Artifact Catalog

The Curated Artifact Catalog is a plugin for the Pentaho Business Analytics Platform. CAC provides an alternative web-based user interface that is friendlier towards end users.

The tree of folders provided by the default Pentaho User Console may be too complicated for busy end users, and it doesn’t provide for having different structures depending on the role of the user. Instead, CAC allows placing any resource (dashboards and reports) into one or more sections, and these sections can be nested and filtered depending on the role of the user. Users can also obtain a full list of all the resources they can access, which they can quickly filter without additional network requests.

Users will also benefit from more nuanced descriptions of the available assets. Resources and sections can include descriptions and images, which are also searchable without additional network requests. These descriptions can be key in providing the extra context needed to understand the information shown (e.g. the data source, the timeliness of the data or the process used to keep them up to date).

Finally, administrators also gain several useful dashboards for performing quick reviews of the permissions assigned to a particular role or user. These dashboards can be used to toggle permissions as well, in a way that may be more comfortable than the standard Pentaho User Console.

The development of CAC started as part of my contract as a Research Associate in the research project “Data quality improvement and business intelligence platform for decision support” (“Mejora de la calidad de los datos y sistema de inteligencia empresarial para la toma de decisiones”, 2013-031/PV/UCA-G/PR) of the University of Cádiz. I coordinated further improvements on CAC as part of the interships of Daniel Peralta-Muñoz and José Alcántara-Muñoz at the Information Systems Office (Dirección General de Sistemas de Información) of the University of Cadiz. Beyond this project, the plugin is now available as open source under the Apache Public License 2.0 on Github.