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Agent Skill

An Agent Skill is a high-level, reusable capability bundle that AI agents adopt — specialized prompts/instructions plus the tools needed to apply them. Skills sit one level above tools: where a tool is a single callable, a skill packages domain expertise (the "how" and "when") together with the low-level tools it relies on. The same skill can be adopted by many agents, so modeling it as its own entity avoids duplicating that expertise on every agent.

Skills follow a "git as source of truth" pattern (e.g. the agentskills.io standard): the skill is defined in a repository and cataloged in DataHub for discovery, governance, and reuse.

Identity

Agent Skills are identified by a single field:

  • id: A unique identifier for the skill, typically a human-readable slug such as customer-service-skill or a generated UUID.

An example URN is urn:li:agentSkill:customer-service-skill.

Important Capabilities

Skill Info

The agentSkillInfo aspect holds the skill's definition:

  • name: Display name, searchable with autocomplete.
  • description: What the skill does and when to use it.
  • instructions: The markdown body of the skill's SKILL.md file (excluding YAML frontmatter) — the execution guidance loaded when the skill is activated.
  • sourceRepository: Where the skill is defined (see below).
  • requiredTools: The API entities the skill needs to operate (SkillRequiresTool).
  • created / lastModified: Audit stamps.

Source Repository

The sourceRepository field (a SkillSourceRepository) points to the git location that owns the skill definition. It carries either a repositoryUrn (preferred, when the Repository is already cataloged in DataHub) or an external url, plus a path to the definition file within the repository (e.g. customer-service/SKILL.md).

Relationship to Agents

Agents adopt skills via the AgentHasSkill relationship declared on the agent's aiAgentDependencies aspect — so an Agent Skill profile surfaces the agents that use it, and a skill in turn exposes the tools it requires. This makes the agent → skill → tool chain traversable from either end.

Governance and Versioning

Agent Skills support the standard governance aspects — ownership, tags, glossary terms, domains, structured properties, and institutional memory — plus native versioning (versionProperties).

Technical Reference Guide

The sections above provide an overview of how to use this entity. The following sections provide detailed technical information about how metadata is stored and represented in DataHub.

Aspects are the individual pieces of metadata that can be attached to an entity. Each aspect contains specific information (like ownership, tags, or properties) and is stored as a separate record, allowing for flexible and incremental metadata updates.

Relationships show how this entity connects to other entities in the metadata graph. These connections are derived from the fields within each aspect and form the foundation of DataHub's knowledge graph.

Reading the Field Tables

Each aspect's field table includes an Annotations column that provides additional metadata about how fields are used:

  • ⚠️ Deprecated: This field is deprecated and may be removed in a future version. Check the description for the recommended alternative
  • Searchable: This field is indexed and can be searched in DataHub's search interface
  • Searchable (fieldname): When the field name in parentheses is shown, it indicates the field is indexed under a different name in the search index. For example, dashboardTool is indexed as tool
  • → RelationshipName: This field creates a relationship to another entity. The arrow indicates this field contains a reference (URN) to another entity, and the name indicates the type of relationship (e.g., → Contains, → OwnedBy)

Fields with complex types (like Edge, AuditStamp) link to their definitions in the Common Types section below.

Aspects

agentSkillInfo

Properties of an AgentSkill ��� a high-level capability bundle (specialized prompts/instructions + the tools it relies on). Skills are higher-level than tools: a skill packages domain expertise and the low-level tools needed to apply it.

FieldTypeRequiredDescriptionAnnotations
namestringDisplay name of the skill.Searchable
descriptionstringDescription of what the skill does and when to use it.Searchable
instructionsstringMarkdown body of the skill's SKILL.md file, excluding YAML frontmatter. This is the execution gui...
sourceRepositorySkillSourceRepositoryGit location where the skill is defined (source of truth).
requiredToolsstring[]Tools this skill requires to operate.Searchable, → SkillRequiresTool
createdAuditStampWhen this skill was registered.Searchable
lastModifiedAuditStampWhen this skill was last modified.Searchable

dataPlatformInstance

The specific instance of the data platform that this entity belongs to

FieldTypeRequiredDescriptionAnnotations
platformstringData PlatformSearchable
instancestringInstance of the data platform (e.g. db instance)Searchable (platformInstance)

ownership

Ownership information of an entity.

FieldTypeRequiredDescriptionAnnotations
ownersOwner[]List of owners of the entity.
ownerTypesmapOwnership type to Owners map, populated via mutation hook.Searchable
lastModifiedAuditStampAudit stamp containing who last modified the record and when. A value of 0 in the time field indi...

status

The lifecycle status metadata of an entity, e.g. dataset, metric, feature, etc. This aspect is used to represent soft deletes conventionally.

FieldTypeRequiredDescriptionAnnotations
removedbooleanWhether the entity has been removed (soft-deleted). Kept for backward compatibility. When lifecyc...Searchable
lifecycleStagestringThe lifecycle stage of the entity, referencing a lifecycleStageType entity. When null, the entity...Searchable
lifecycleLastUpdatedAuditStampAttribution for the lifecycle stage transition ��� who moved the entity into its current stage an...

globalTags

Tag aspect used for applying tags to an entity

FieldTypeRequiredDescriptionAnnotations
tagsTagAssociation[]Tags associated with a given entitySearchable, → TaggedWith

glossaryTerms

Related business terms information

FieldTypeRequiredDescriptionAnnotations
termsGlossaryTermAssociation[]The related business terms
auditStampAuditStampAudit stamp containing who reported the related business term

semanticContent

Semantic content for enabling vector similarity search.

This aspect stores chunked text and embedding vectors for any entity that supports semantic search. Generation of the data for this aspect should be built in tight collaboration with the embedding generator during semantic search query processing. Chunk determination and generation can happen somewhat independently The data in this aspect is directly passed along to the semantic search index.

Design notes:

  • Supports multiple embedding models (e.g., different providers or versions)
  • Supports chunked content for long documents
  • Text field is optional to support privacy-sensitive use cases where only embeddings (not source text) are shared with DataHub
FieldTypeRequiredDescriptionAnnotations
embeddingsmapMap of embedding model name to embedding data. Key is the model identifier (e.g., cohere_embed_v3...

institutionalMemory

Institutional memory of an entity. This is a way to link to relevant documentation and provide description of the documentation. Institutional or tribal knowledge is very important for users to leverage the entity.

FieldTypeRequiredDescriptionAnnotations
elementsInstitutionalMemoryMetadata[]List of records that represent institutional memory of an entity. Each record consists of a link,...

domains

Links from an Asset to its Domains

FieldTypeRequiredDescriptionAnnotations
domainsstring[]The Domains attached to an AssetSearchable, → AssociatedWith
domainAssociationsDomainAssociation[]Additional per-domain association metadata such as attribution and propagation source. A superset...

structuredProperties

Properties about an entity governed by StructuredPropertyDefinition

FieldTypeRequiredDescriptionAnnotations
propertiesStructuredPropertyValueAssignment[]Custom property bag.

versionProperties

Properties about a versioned asset i.e. dataset, ML Model, etc.

FieldTypeRequiredDescriptionAnnotations
versionSetstringThe linked Version Set entity that ties multiple versioned assets togetherSearchable, → VersionOf
versionVersionTagLabel for this versioned asset, is unique within a version setSearchable
aliasesVersionTag[]Associated aliases for this versioned assetSearchable
commentstringComment documenting what this version was created for, changes, or represents
sortIdstringSort identifier that determines where a version lives in the order of the Version Set. What this ...Searchable (versionSortId)
versioningSchemeVersioningSchemeWhat versioning scheme sortId belongs to. Defaults to a plain string that is lexicographically ...
sourceCreatedTimestampAuditStampTimestamp reflecting when this asset version was created in the source system.
metadataCreatedTimestampAuditStampTimestamp reflecting when the metadata for this version was created in DataHub
isLatestbooleanMarks whether this version is currently the latest. Set by a side effect and should not be modifi...Searchable

Common Types

These types are used across multiple aspects in this entity.

AuditStamp

Data captured on a resource/association/sub-resource level giving insight into when that resource/association/sub-resource moved into a particular lifecycle stage, and who acted to move it into that specific lifecycle stage.

Fields:

  • time (long): When did the resource/association/sub-resource move into the specific lifecyc...
  • actor (string): The entity (e.g. a member URN) which will be credited for moving the resource...
  • impersonator (string?): The entity (e.g. a service URN) which performs the change on behalf of the Ac...
  • message (string?): Additional context around how DataHub was informed of the particular change. ...

VersionTag

A resource-defined string representing the resource state for the purpose of concurrency control

Fields:

  • versionTag (string?):
  • metadataAttribution (MetadataAttribution?):

Relationships

Outgoing

These are the relationships stored in this entity's aspects

  • SkillRequiresTool

    • Api via agentSkillInfo.requiredTools
  • OwnedBy

    • Corpuser via ownership.owners.owner
    • CorpGroup via ownership.owners.owner
  • ownershipType

    • OwnershipType via ownership.owners.typeUrn
  • TaggedWith

    • Tag via globalTags.tags
  • TermedWith

    • GlossaryTerm via glossaryTerms.terms.urn
  • AssociatedWith

    • Domain via domains.domains
  • VersionOf

    • VersionSet via versionProperties.versionSet

Incoming

These are the relationships stored in other entity's aspects

  • AgentHasSkill

    • AiAgent via aiAgentDependencies.skills

Global Metadata Model

Global Graph

💡 Contributing to this documentation

This page is auto-generated from the underlying source code. To make changes, please edit the relevant source files in the metadata-models directory.

Tip: For quick typo fixes or documentation updates, you can click the ✏️ Edit icon directly in the GitHub UI to open a Pull Request. For larger changes and PR naming conventions, please refer to our Contributing Guide.