Knowledge Catalog - AI-Powered Metadata Management

AI-powered metadata management for data discovery and data governance on Google Cloud. Automatic detection, classification, and management of data assets.

What is Knowledge Catalog?

Knowledge Catalog is Google’s central metadata management service and the successor to Data Catalog and Dataplex Universal Catalog (renamed in April 2026). It helps enterprises understand, organize, and manage their growing data assets. As companies store data across dozens of systems, it becomes increasingly difficult to keep track of which data resides where and who has access to it.

The service automatically extracts metadata from Google Cloud data sources such as BigQuery, Spanner, Bigtable, AlloyDB, Cloud SQL, Pub/Sub, Looker, Dataform, and Cloud Storage, building a dynamic context graph. Teams can additionally add business metadata via tags and a business glossary to capture business context. This bridges the gap between technical data assets and business understanding, and increasingly serves as a foundation for grounding AI agents in reliable enterprise knowledge.

Knowledge Catalog is more than a search tool. The service enables data governance through Policy Tags that enforce access policies at the column level. Data lineage shows how data flows through transformations. Integration with Sensitive Data Protection automatically identifies personally identifiable information. API endpoints, gcloud dataplex commands, and client libraries remain unaffected by the rename, so existing integrations continue to work.

Core Features

• Automatic metadata extraction from core Google Cloud data services
• Business glossary and tagging for business context
• Data lineage and data quality checks
• Semantic search across metadata and schema
• Policy Tags for enforcing column-level access policies
• Integration with AI agents via Model Context Protocol (MCP)

Typical Use Cases

Data Discovery and Cataloging

For organizations with hundreds of BigQuery datasets and Cloud Storage buckets, manual metadata management is no longer practical. Knowledge Catalog automatically crawls data sources, captures schema information, and makes them discoverable through central search.

Metadata Management

Technical metadata alone is often insufficient. Knowledge Catalog enables storing business metadata as tags: Who is the data owner? What is the update frequency of the dataset? Which processes use this data?

Data Lineage Tracking

Data lineage shows how data flows through pipelines, which tables are sources, which transformations are applied, and which downstream systems consume the data. This is essential for impact analysis when schemas change.

Data Governance and Compliance

Policy Tags allow data protection policies to be defined centrally and enforced automatically, such as “PII data visible only to authorized officers” at the column level in BigQuery.

Sensitive Data Identification

Integration with Sensitive Data Protection enables automatic identification of personally identifiable information, credit card numbers, or other sensitive information, which can be stored as tags.

Benefits

• Central overview of distributed data assets instead of siloed solutions
• AI-powered context graph as a foundation for reliable agent responses
• Seamless transition from predecessor products without manual migration
• Supports GDPR compliance through Policy Tags and sensitive data detection

Integration with innFactory

As a certified Google Cloud partner, innFactory supports you in implementing Knowledge Catalog as a central element of your data governance strategy. We help with defining tagging strategies, integrating with existing systems, and automating metadata management processes.

Our expertise includes designing Policy Tag hierarchies for GDPR compliance, developing Custom Entry integrations for external data sources, and building data lineage pipelines for end-to-end transparency.

Contact us for consultation on Knowledge Catalog and data governance on Google Cloud.