Robot Heads

Alation Cloud Service Applies to Alation Cloud Service instances of Alation

Customer Managed Applies to customer-managed instances of Alation

Important

You are viewing documentation for Classic Alation.

ALLIE is a machine learning algorithm that generates comprehensive catalog titles for names of data objects.

Data can sometimes be hard to understand because names of data objects have abbreviated words. For example, if column names are rg_k and rgnl_sls, it would require knowledge of this specific domain to understand that these abbreviations stand for “region key” and “regional sales”.

On the catalog pages of schema, table, and column objects in your Alation Catalog, you may see robot head indicators that can be red or yellow:

On the catalog pages of schema, table, and column objects in your Alation Catalog, you may see robot head indicators that can be red, yellow, or green:

These indicators are the result of the ALLIE algorithm auto-titling your catalog objects by matching abbreviated names found in your metadata to meaningful words to help you better understand your data.

Note

The auto-titling job runs automatically, weekly, over the weekend. It parses the metadata in your catalog for abbreviations, maps them to meaningful expansions, and registers the matches in the Lexicon, which is a list of matches between abbreviations and expansions stored in Alation.

When a schema, table, or column title has a robot head indicator on a catalog page, it means ALLIE has generated an auto-title for this object. The color indicates the level of confidence of the guess:

Icon	Color	Description
	Red	ALLIE guessed the title with low confidence that it may be correct.
	Yellow	ALLIE guessed the title with some confidence that it may be correct.

Once the ALLIE title is rejected or accepted, the robot head will no longer show.

Icon	Color	Description
	Red	ALLIE guessed the title with low confidence that it may be correct.
	Yellow	ALLIE guessed the title with some confidence that it may be correct, but this guess remains unconfirmed by users.
	Green	ALLIE generated a title and a user manually confirmed it.

ALLIE Confidence Levels

Anytime there is ambiguity as to which word an abbreviation can be expanded into, the confidence of the guess will be lowered. The confidence score will change based on acceptances or rejections done by users on the Lexicon page and on catalog pages of specific objects.

Confidence	Result
> 90%	Yellow icon
70-90%	Red icon
< 70%	No title will be suggested