🐜 Alternative Name Types are now available for all users!

Feature Announcement
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We’ve launched support for Alternative Names in the Aristotle Metadata Registry - and ticked another milestone off the 2021 Aristotle Metadata Roadmap

What are “Alterntative Names”?

In the Aristotle Metadata Registry, all metadata types have a name that identifies them across the registry. However, in reality things rarely have a single “name” - for example, as an individual I go by Sam, Samuel or “Sam Spencer”. Similarly, metadata and related data releases also have multiple names.

For example, the Australian and New Zealand Standard Classification of Occupations is also formally known as ANZSCO - and both names need to be recorded.

Previously, only one name could be recorded for metadata types but now - we’ve added ISO-compliant support into the Aristotle Metadata Registry so that all the different names of your metadata can be recorded.

By defining an Alternative Name Type :ant:, you can specifiy the different ways metadata is named across your organisation, and help users accurately understand how data is named and identified - for example, using Alternative Names you can add:

  • a “Short name” to capture an abbreviated name that is used when reporting
  • a “Common Name” to store how users usually refer to metadata
  • a “Physical name” to record how a metadata field is commonly refered in a database

As you can see below, we’ve set up an “Abbreviation” alternative name in Aristotle.Cloud and when hovering, a user can see exactly what this means:
image

And lastly - alternative names can even be used when generating downloads to override how metadata is displayed when producing PDF or Word data dictionaries!

Screenshot from 2021-08-02 11-17-04

To learn more about how to setup and create Alternative Names from our Knowledge Base, or ask us a question below:

3 Likes
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This is AWESOME - I love it. but :grinning:

We in our wisdom created a custom field called physical name where we put this information into. Is there a nice neat quick way we can move the information we have in the custom field into alternate name>physical name?

Additionally when will be able to query against these fields?

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There are probably a few people in your situation with a custom field that was used to store name information. I’ll pass your feedback onto the team, and I’ll see if we can add a little management command to help migrate from a custom field to a name.

The custom fields should be accessible via the API, but I don’t think they are in the GraphQL yet. I’ll put it in the product backlog and let you know when that is available- but definitely by the end of the month.

1 Like
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I’m writing an API extraction routine to pull table and column metadata out of Cloudera Atlas and create matching distributions in Aristotle. For the physical table names I’ll try the Alternative Name type API calls.

Another potential alternative name might be the actual Atlas guid … I’ll have to give it some more thought.

A method to convert all existing distribution custom physical names into alternative name physical names would be a logical offshoot fro this work. I’ll look into it once my main task is completed.

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