discovery

Discovery — finding assets and business terms

Chip has three discovery entry points. They serve different shapes of question; picking the wrong one is the most common cause of empty results.

Decision rule

• Open-ended, conceptual, or paraphrased question ("what customer data do we have?", "find tables with revenue figures") → discover_data_assets (semantic search over data assets) or discover_business_glossary (semantic search over the business glossary).
• Exact name known, or filtering by type/community/domain/status → search_asset_keyword. Its filters accept a name or a UUID — pass assetType: "Table" or status: "Obsolete" directly; no separate UUID lookup is needed.
• Disambiguating an asset type name → list_asset_types (not required just to filter — the assetType filter already resolves names).

Do not start with search_asset_keyword for paraphrased questions. The keyword search will miss synonyms, plurals, and definitional matches that semantic search returns.

Permission gates

• discover_data_assets and discover_business_glossary require the dgc.ai-copilot scope. If a call returns a permission error, surface the scope name to the user — do not silently fall back to keyword search, because the result set will be qualitatively different.
• search_asset_keyword and list_asset_types work with default catalog read scopes.

Workflow: from name to UUID

Most chip tools require a UUID. The pattern:

1. Call discover_data_assets (or discover_business_glossary, or search_asset_keyword) with the user's phrasing.
2. From the response, pick the UUID of the asset whose name and type match the user's intent. If multiple plausible matches exist, present them to the user and ask which they meant — do not guess.
3. Pass that UUID to the next tool (get_asset_details, get_table_semantics, get_column_semantics, get_measure_data, get_business_term_data, etc.).

Hard rules

1. Do not paraphrase the user when searching. The semantic search ranks against the user's own wording — passing a rewritten query loses signal.
2. Resolve ambiguity before drilling down. If two assets share a name across domains, ask the user which they want. Do not call detail tools on a guess.
3. list_asset_types is for confirming or disambiguating a type, not for browsing. search_asset_keyword's assetType filter accepts a type name or UUID directly, so reach for list_asset_types only when a name is ambiguous — not as a first-step exploration tool. To disambiguate, pass name to narrow server-side, or product (e.g. HELPDESK, GLOSSARY) to separate a real product type from a test/decoy type of the same name. A publicId/product filter scans a bounded window of the catalog — check resultsTruncated before treating the result as complete; if it is true, narrow further with name rather than trusting the list.