AWS Big Data Blog

Amazon DataZone enhances data discovery with advanced search filtering

Amazon DataZone, a fully managed data management service, helps organizations catalog, discover, analyze, share, and govern data between data producers and consumers. We are excited to announce the introduction of advanced search filtering capabilities in the Amazon DataZone business data catalog.

With the improved rendering of glossary terms, you can now navigate large sets of terms with ease in an expandable and collapsible hierarchy, reducing the time and effort required to locate specific data assets. The introduction of logical operators (AND and OR) for filtering allows for more precise searches, enabling you to combine multiple criteria in a way that best suits your needs. The descriptive summary of search criteria helps users keep track of their applied filters, making it simple to adjust search parameters on the fly.

In this post, we discuss how these new search filtering capabilities enhance the user experience and boost the accuracy of search results, facilitating the ability to find data quickly.

Challenges

Many of our customers manage vast numbers of data assets within the Amazon DataZone catalog for discoverability. Data producers tag these assets with business glossary terms to classify and enhance discovery. For example, data assets owned by a particular department can be tagged with the glossary term for that department, like “Marketing.”

Data consumers searching for the right data assets use faceted search with various criteria, including business glossary terms, and apply filters to refine their search results. However, finding the right data assets can be challenging, especially when it involves combining multiple filters. Customers wanted more flexibility and precision in their search capabilities, such as:

  • A more intuitive way to navigate through extensive lists of glossary terms
  • The ability to apply more nuanced search logic to refine search results with greater precision
  • A summary of applied filters to effortlessly review and adjust search criteria

New features in Amazon DataZone

With the latest release, Amazon DataZone now supports features that enhance search flexibility and accuracy:

  • Improved rendering of glossary terms – Glossary terms are now displayed in a hierarchical view, providing a more organized structure. You can navigate and select from long lists of glossary terms presented in an expandable and collapsible hierarchy within the search facets. For instance, a data scientist can quickly find specific customer demographic data without sifting through an overwhelming flat list.
  • Logical operators for refined search – You can now choose logical operators to refine your search results, offering greater control and precision. For example, a financial analyst preparing a report on investment performance can use AND logic to combine criteria like investment type and region to pinpoint the exact data needed, or use OR logic to broaden the search to include any investments that meet either criterion.
  • Summary of search criteria – A descriptive summary of applied search filters is now provided, allowing you to review and manage your search criteria with ease. For example, a project manager can quickly adjust filters to find project-related assets matching specific phases or statuses.

These enhancements enable you to better understand the relationships between different search facets, enhancing the overall search experience and making it effortless to find the right data assets.

Use case overview

To demonstrate these search enhancements, we set up a new Amazon DataZone domain with two projects:

  • Marketing project – Publishes campaign-related data assets from the Marketing department. These data assets have been tagged with relevant business glossary terms corresponding to marketing.
  • Sales project – Publishes sales-related datasets from the Sales department. These data assets have been tagged with relevant business glossary terms corresponding to sales.

The following screenshots show examples of the different tagged assets.

In the following sections, we demonstrate the improvements in the user search experience for this use case.

Improved rendering of glossary terms

As a data consumer, you want to discover data assets using the faceted search capability within Amazon DataZone.

The search result panel has been enhanced to display glossaries and glossary terms in a hierarchical fashion. This allows you to expand and collapse sections for a more intuitive search experience.

For example, if you want to find product sales data assets from the Corporate Sales department, you can select the appropriate term within the glossary. The selection criteria and the corresponding result list show a total of 18 data assets, as shown in the following screenshot.

Next, if you want to further refine your search to focus only on the product category of Smartphones, you can do so.

Because OR is the default logical operator for your search within the glossary terms, it lists all the assets that are either part of Corporate Sales or tagged with Smartphones.

Logical operators for refined search

You now have the flexibility to change the default operator to AND to list only those data assets that are part of Corporate Sales and tagged with Smartphones, narrowing down the result set.

Additionally, you can further filter based on the asset type by selecting the available options. When you select Glue Table as your asset type, it defaults to the AND condition across the glossary terms and the asset type filter, thereby showing the data assets that satisfy all the filter conditions.

You also have the flexibility to change the operator to OR across these filters, yielding a more exhaustive list of data assets.

Summary of search criteria

As we showed in the preceding screenshots, the results also display a summary of the filters you applied for the search. This enables you to review and better manage your search criteria.

Conclusion

This post demonstrated new Amazon DataZone search enhancement features that streamline data discovery for a more intuitive user experience. These enhancements are designed to empower data consumers within organizations to make more informed decisions, faster. By streamlining the search process and making it more intuitive, Amazon DataZone continues to support the growing needs of data-driven businesses, helping you unlock the full potential of your data assets.

For more information about Amazon DataZone and to get started, refer to the Amazon DataZone User Guide.

About the authors

Chaitanya Vejendla is a Senior Solutions Architect specialized in DataLake & Analytics primarily working for Healthcare and Life Sciences industry division at AWS. Chaitanya is responsible for helping life sciences organizations and healthcare companies in developing modern data strategies, deploy data governance and analytical applications, electronic medical records, devices, and AI/ML-based applications, while educating customers about how to build secure, scalable, and cost-effective AWS solutions. His expertise spans across data analytics, data governance, AI, ML, big data, and healthcare-related technologies.

Ramesh H Singh is a Senior Product Manager Technical (External Services) at AWS in Seattle, Washington, currently with the Amazon DataZone team. He is passionate about building high-performance ML/AI and analytics products that enable enterprise customers to achieve their critical goals using cutting-edge technology.

Rishabh Asthana is a Front-end Engineer at AWS, working with the Amazon DataZone team based in New York City, USA.

Somdeb Bhattacharjee is an Enterprise Solutions Architect based out of New York, USA focused on helping customers on their cloud journey. He has interest in Databases, Big Data and Analytics.