Summary Unity Catalog documents what data is supposed to be, but not what users have learned by using it. I'm proposing a persistent Q&A and knowledge layer on catalog assets, so that questions get answered where people discover the data and the answers stay with it. Problem Practical knowledge lives outside the catalog. Caveats such as "this table lags by two days", "this ID changed in the 2024 migration" or "don't use this field for revenue" sit in Slack, Teams, tickets and people's heads. The next analyst never finds them. The same questions get asked repeatedly. A question is asked privately, answered, and lost, so it gets asked again six months later. Stewards are a scarce resource. Many consumers don't know who owns an asset or whether they can contact them. Stewards who are reachable get overwhelmed with repeat questions. Governance teams get no signal on documentation quality. They can't see which fields users demonstrably don't understand. Proposed solution Add a Knowledge tab to catalog assets (tables and columns first, then views, schemas, models and others), alongside Overview, Lineage and Quality. Ask: Users ask questions in context. The AI answers using the catalog's own context: metadata, comments, tags, lineage, quality information, usage, and prior Q&A on the asset. Rate: Users can mark answers Helpful, Incorrect, or Needs clarification. Conflicting feedback is shown, not hidden. Escalate: When AI confidence is low, the question can be routed to the community, a data steward, or the data owner. Their answer becomes persistent knowledge on the asset. Confirm: Authorized users can mark answers as confirmed or pin them as authoritative. Summarize: AI maintains a concise knowledge summary per asset (known caveats, open questions, community confidence), with every claim linked to its source discussion. Find gaps: Surface fields that generate many repeated questions (for example, "47 questions about customer_status in 90 days") so governance teams know what to document. Trust and governance requirements Provenance labels. Every item is labeled as one of: official metadata, steward-confirmed, community, AI-generated, or unverified. Permissions. Discussions inherit the access controls of the underlying asset. Column-level discussions must not expose content to users who can't see that column. Freshness. Confirmed answers are flagged for review when the asset's schema, definition or lineage changes, so stale confirmations don't create false assurance. Moderation. Stewards and owners can edit, retract, or archive answers. Auditability. AI answers cite the sources they were built from. Expected benefits Data consumers: faster answers, fewer wrong assumptions, less dependence on individual experts. Stewards: answer once and help many; fewer repetitive questions; questions arrive with context. Governance teams: scalable stewardship, durable institutional knowledge, and evidence-based prioritization of documentation work. The aim is to extend Unity Catalog from a system of record for metadata into a system of record for what an organization has learned about its data.
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