AWS Glue Data Catalog now supports business context and semantic search (Preview)

Today, AWS announces the preview of business context and semantic search for AWS Glue Data Catalog, helping you discover and understand data by semantic meaning. You can now enrich your Glue Data Catalog tables, including those backed by S3 Tables, with glossary terms and custom metadata fields. You can also add skills to the catalog that direct agents to additional context about your data. With business context indexed alongside technical metadata, you can use the new Glue Search API to find data by semantic meaning, and ground your AI agents in trusted definitions rather than inferred context.

You can use the new search capability to find tables in the catalog both by their structure, such as schema and table format, and by the business meaning you attach through glossary terms and descriptive metadata fields. This means an analyst exploring data or an agent reasoning about it can retrieve a table's definition, what its data represents, and how to use it correctly, in a single step. Any MCP-compatible agent, including Claude Code, Kiro, Cursor, and Codex, can get started with virtually no setup using the aws-data-analytics plugin from the Agent Toolkit for AWS.

Business context and semantic search for AWS Glue Data Catalog is available in preview in the following AWS Regions: US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Ireland). To learn more, visit the AWS Glue User Guide. To connect an AI agent to Glue Data Catalog, install the aws-data-analytics plugin from the Agent Toolkit for AWS repository on GitHub.