The Atlan MCP Cookbook

Enrich assets with your context

Bring context that lives outside Atlan, like a spreadsheet or a Confluence page, onto your assets as owners, tags, and additional metadata.

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On the menu

Use case
Make data understandable
Action
Make changes
Persona
Data/BI Analyst, Data Engineer, Data Governance Lead
Effort
Quick
Runs in
any AI tool

The task

Scenario. Atlan crawled 300 tables in the orders schema, and Context Agents Studio has already generated AI-ready descriptions and READMEs for all those assets. You also have extra context that lives elsewhere and could add to them: a spreadsheet of table owners, and a Confluence page of business knowledge to add. You want to pull that in without re-keying it by hand.

The ask

  • The orders tables and what each still needs (owner, tags, extra description detail)
  • Owners and tags applied from your spreadsheet
  • Each description or README enriched with the details from Confluence

Hero prompt

Hero prompt

I have a spreadsheet of table owners and a Confluence page describing the orders tables. Set the owners and tags from the spreadsheet, and enrich each table's description with the details from Confluence.

Step by step

  1. Find the target assets and what each still needs.

    Step 1

    Show the tables in the <schema> schema and flag what each still needs — owner, tags, extra description detail.

  2. Match your outside context to them and show the plan.

    Step 2

    Using my spreadsheet of owners/tags and the Confluence page on <schema>, match each row to its table and show what you'll set before writing.

  3. Apply the owners, tags, and enriched descriptions.

    Step 3

    Set the owners and tags, and add the Confluence details to each table's description or README.

What you'll give it

Required context

  • The schema or keyword that scopes the assets (orders)
  • Your outside context: a spreadsheet, a Confluence page, or similar
  • Permission to update asset metadata

Optional context

  • Which fields the external source maps to (which column is owner, which is tag)
  • Descriptions and READMEs already generated by Context Agents Studio, so this only layers on any extra detail
  • A house style for how the added detail should read

What Atlan creates

Outputs

  • The orders assets matched to your spreadsheet / Confluence source, with the gaps shown
  • Owners and tags set from the spreadsheet, previewed before anything is saved
  • Descriptions and READMEs enriched with the Confluence details, on top of what Context Agents Studio already produced

Summary. The context you already have, sitting in a spreadsheet or a wiki, lands on the assets: owned, tagged, and described with detail Studio couldn't infer from the tables alone.

Writes to Atlan

Changed: owners, tags, and description/README detail on the matched orders tables. Left untouched: the data, the schema, and the Context Agents Studio baseline you're adding to.

Follow-up prompts

Keep going once the first answer lands.

Extend to the next schema

Extend to the next schema

Do the same for the payments schema, but skip any table that already has a description.

Certify the ready ones

Certify the ready ones

Mark every table that now has an owner, tags, and a description as Verified.

Tag while you're in there

Tag while you're in there

For the same tables, add a Domain: Orders tag and flag any column that looks like PII for me to review.

Tips & troubleshooting

Cook's note

Run it on one schema first. Review what it proposes before you let it write across the rest of your assets.

  • Match the tool to the work. This writes metadata, so run it somewhere that shows you the proposed changes before it saves. Approve the batch, then let it write.
  • Automate or chain it. Once you're happy with the results, point the same prompt at a whole database on a schedule, so newly crawled tables get AI-ready descriptions the day they land.
  • Ask what it changed. Add "list every asset you changed and every field you wrote" to the prompt. That list is your record of what got enriched.
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