This post was co-written with Anthony Lempelius and James Mesney from Alation.
When a team wants to reuse a dataset, whether it is to build a new pipeline, launch a dashboard, run an analysis, or power an AI application, the first challenge is rarely the code. Data engineers need to understand lineage, transformations, and operational expectations. Data analysts and BI engineers need consistent definitions, metrics, and trusted sources. Data scientists and AI engineers need to know provenance, quality, access constraints, and how data or features were derived. In many organizations, that context is captured in different places by different teams, often across solutions like Alation and SageMaker Unified Studio, both of which can serve as a system of record for business context depending on who is doing the work and where they operate day to day. When those perspectives are not connected, people revalidate the same information, debate definitions, and duplicate…
