Infer and confirm
What Datapace reads, what it infers with a confidence score, inferred versus validated, and how a few working sessions turn proposals into a confirmed model.
What Datapace reads
Datapace is designed to read within the scope agreed with your team, and to read three kinds of signal:
- Schema metadata. Tables, columns, types, constraints, keys, views, and the comments people left behind.
- Workload signals. Which queries run, how often, how long, on which tables, joined how.
- Sample structures. The shape of values (formats, ranges, distinct counts), which is how an email column or a status code announces itself.
Workload signals are what a schema alone cannot give: a join that runs ten thousand times a day is a relationship whether or not a foreign key declares it, and a table nobody has read in a year says something no comment does.
What it infers
From those signals Datapace proposes the meaning facts of the graph: entities, measures, relationships, semantics, and lineage. Every proposal carries a confidence score, a number between 0 and 1 that says how much of the evidence points the same way.
| Signal | What it suggests | Typical confidence |
|---|---|---|
A column named email whose values all match an address format | Personal data, email | High |
| Two tables joined on the same pair of columns in most of the workload | A relationship | High |
A free-text notes column with occasional phone numbers | Personal data, to review | Low |
A table named tmp_customers_2019 with no reads in a year | A stale copy | Medium |
The table is illustrative. The point is that the score is on the record and that a low score is a question for a person, not a guess that slips through.
Inferred versus validated
Every meaning fact is in one of two states:
- Inferred. Proposed by Datapace, with its score. Visible, usable for review, not yet trusted.
- Validated. Accepted or corrected by one of your experts. Part of the confirmed graph.
Agents draft their work on the confirmed graph. AI systems reading through governed context see validated facts, and see inferred ones only as such. Nothing enters the confirmed graph unvalidated.
The working sessions
Confirmation is a few sessions with the people who know the data, not a project. Datapace sorts the proposals so that a session covers what matters first: the entities most of the workload touches, the columns flagged as personal data, the relationships with the most joins behind them, the measures dashboards already report.
In a session an expert accepts a proposal, corrects it, or marks it for someone else. Each decision is recorded with who made it and when. See documenting an estate for how a first pass runs.
Living documentation
Once confirmed, the graph is the documentation, and it stays current because the signals keep arriving. A new table appears as an inferred entity waiting for review; a query pattern that changes shows up as a relationship to confirm; a column that starts carrying addresses is flagged again. The Documentation agent proposes the updates and your team approves them, the same way it approves everything else.