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Ontology Map

A Map That Builds Itself

Every source, table, pipeline, metric, dashboard, and business object in your workspace, connected and computed live from what you've already built. No diagram to maintain, nothing that can drift.

What It Is

Nothing to keep up to date, because nothing is hand-written.

The ontology map is a live view of your workspace: every source you've connected, every table you have, every pipeline that built one, every metric and dashboard that reads from one, and every business object (like Customer or Country) your tables represent. It's assembled fresh, every time you open it, straight from the same records the platform already keeps. There's no separate lineage document sitting off to the side going stale. Change your workspace, and the map changes with it.

Reading the Map: Node Kinds

Six kinds of nodes, one icon each.

Source
A connected data source, like a GCS bucket, a BigQuery project, or a REST API.
Table
A physical table in Raw, Clean, or Ready.
Pipeline
A pipeline you built, ingesting or transforming data into a table.
Metric
A business metric defined in the semantic layer, draft or certified.
Dashboard
A dashboard that reads from one or more tables.
Object
A business entity, like Customer or Country, resolved across tables through entity matching.

Reading the Map: Connections

Every line on the map is labeled with what it means.

Produces

A pipeline built this table.

Ingests to

A source loads its data into this table.

Reads

A dashboard queries this table.

Uses

A metric is calculated from this table.

Transforms into

SQL turned one table into another.

Conforms to

Entity matching turned this table into a standardized, canonical one.

Represents

This table's rows describe a business object.

Joins to

These two tables are commonly joined together in queries.

Using the Page

Five ways to work the map.

Click a node

Opens a side panel with the node's details, when it was created and last updated (when known), and "Depends on this": everything downstream that would be affected by a change.

Search

Type a name and press Enter, or click a result, to pan and zoom straight to that node.

Unconnected nodes hidden

Nodes with no edges are hidden by default. A chip shows how many, and toggling it lays them out in a grid below the connected map.

Legend

A collapsible key in the corner maps each icon back to its node kind.

Pan, zoom, fit

Drag to pan, scroll to zoom, and the map fits itself to the screen the moment it loads.

Why Does a Node Have No Connections?

An unconnected node just means nothing registered a link to it yet. The most common case is a pipeline that never ran, or ran but never registered an output table. The map isn't broken; it's telling you the truth about your workspace. Once that pipeline produces a real table, the connection shows up on its own.

The Ontology Beyond the Map

The same graph shows up in three other places.

Guardrails before you break something

Deleting a data source or saving Silver SQL checks the map first. If the change would touch metrics or dashboards downstream, you get a warning naming exactly how many, before you confirm. It warns, it never blocks.

Ask the Manager

Ask "what feeds what?" or "what breaks if I change this table?" in plain English. The Manager reads the same live map to answer.

Metrics stay human-approved

When the Manager proposes a metric on your behalf, it lands as a draft. Nothing becomes certified or governed until a human approves it in the semantic layer.

Availability

The ontology map is a Scale plan feature. On other plans, the page explains what's needed to unlock it instead of showing an error.

See the whole workspace

Stop guessing what a change will break.

One map, built from what you already have. No diagram to maintain.

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