The Connection Map
The third row of Discovery is a map of how your sources connect to one another. It answers a question no list can: is anything here actually joined up, and where?
What a bubble is
One bubble per source. Its size is how many of that source’s assets are connected to something — not how many assets it has. The ring around it is the priority mix of that source’s open findings, and the number inside is the connected asset count.
Underneath each bubble is a muted count of unconnected assets: ones with no link of any kind. Those are never drawn.
That is deliberate, and it is what makes the map usable at any size. A corpus of two million assets still produces a dozen bubbles, because the map is keyed by source rather than by asset. Drawing a dot for every isolated asset would bury the structure you came to look at under the material that has none.
The five kinds of link
A line between two bubbles is every edge running between those two sources. Its thickness is the number of edges; its colour is whichever kind dominates. Use the chips above the map to show one kind at a time.
| Link | What it means |
|---|---|
| Lineage | Data moved. This is the only kind that says one thing came from another. |
| Contains | Structure — an archive member, an attachment, a table in a schema. |
| Same as | The same thing seen twice, in two systems. |
| References | A mention, a foreign key, a link. Carries meaning, moves nothing. |
| Used by | Someone or something touched it. |
Selecting a line breaks it down by kind, and shows how many duplicate pairs the review queue has found across that pairing — with a shortcut into it, filtered to those two sources.
Opening a source
Double-click a bubble (or use Open this source in the panel) to replace it with its own assets and their internal links. Double-click again to close it.
The members are fetched at that moment rather than shipped with the map, which is why the dashboard’s first paint does not get slower as a source grows.
Assets that reach across sources
An asset whose links leave its own source is drawn on its own, sitting between its bubble and whatever it reaches — so a cross-source path is visible without opening anything.
When a pairing carries more of these than can be read individually, they collapse into a single labelled node: “1,204 linked assets”. Nothing is discarded; the map is simply a level coarser there, and the node opens like any other.
Selecting one of these assets offers Trace lineage, which opens the full
lineage view for it — the same walk the get_asset_lineage
tool performs.
How fresh it is
The map is served from a pre-aggregated index rebuilt in the background whenever edges change, coalesced so a scan emitting relationships for an hour produces a trickle of rebuilds rather than one per batch. Until a workspace’s first build finishes, the bubbles appear without counts and the map says it is building.