Business Context Overview
Introduction
The 360° Context Hub is the heart of Promethium’s intelligence layer, an adaptive system that translates human intent into relevant data answers by capturing and applying your organization’s technical metadata, glossaries, and business logic.
While traditional data catalogs rely primarily on technical metadata (e.g., table names, column types), the 360 Context Hub goes further. It incorporates business metadata and domain-specific language to enable more accurate, explainable, and reusable insights across your organization.
Why Context Matters
In most enterprises, structured datasets are fragmented across multiple systems and described using raw technical metadata:
- Table and column names
- Data types (e.g., string, date, decimal)
- Table relationships or foreign keys
However, this metadata alone is insufficient to power question-centric data analysis. Technical definitions often lack business meaning, and the same term can vary in usage across teams, and departments.
For example:
| Term | Technical Metadata | Business Context Needed |
|---|---|---|
| fiscal_year | VARCHAR(10) | Should be used in internal reporting for all revenue and sales data, differs from calendar year |
| revenue | DECIMAL(12,2) | Excludes discounts, includes state taxes, reported in USD |
| customer_churn | Not present | Defined as no purchase in 30 days |
Without this layer of contextual enrichment, queries can return non-relevant results or mislead end users.
This enables Promethium to:
- Understand ambiguous or fuzzy language in natural-language questions
- Automatically choose the most relevant columns, tables, and filters
- Improve consistency and accuracy across teams
- Reduce dependency on manual SQL or tribal knowledge
It is continuously enriched through:
- Metadata crawls from connected platforms
- Organizational glossaries and rule files that can be uploaded in bulk
- Manual input by data stewards or SMEs
- AI-assisted discovery from natural language interactions