Microsoft Purview Unified Catalog - Governance Domain Hierarchy Roll-up of Business Concepts (Child Assets)

Hello Sam,

The behavior you are seeing is expected with the current Governance Domain hierarchy model.

A parent Governance Domain does not automatically inherit or roll up the Data Products, Glossary Terms, or other catalog assets assigned to its child Governance Domains. The hierarchy primarily provides an organizational structure rather than an inherited asset-membership model.

For organizations using several levels of Governance Domains, I would recommend keeping the hierarchy relatively shallow where possible and assigning assets to the Governance Domain in which they are actually governed. For discovery, users can then navigate to the relevant child domain rather than relying on the parent domain to display all descendant assets.

For example:

Enterprise
└── Finance
    ├── Accounts Payable
    ├── Accounts Receivable
    └── Financial Reporting

A Data Product governed by Accounts Payable should remain associated with that domain rather than being duplicated in Finance simply to make it discoverable from the parent.

If parent-level discovery of all descendant assets is an important requirement, I would recommend submitting or upvoting this as a Microsoft Purview product feature request, specifically requesting descendant-asset roll-up for Governance Domains. This would also allow the product team to distinguish between simple navigation and actual inherited governance ownership.

Until such functionality is available, avoiding unnecessarily deep hierarchies and using consistent asset naming, descriptions, glossary relationships, and other catalog metadata can help compensate for the lack of automatic roll-up.

I would not recommend manually duplicating the same business concepts across parent and child domains, as that can introduce ownership and governance ambiguity.

Hello Sam,

The behavior you describe appears to be related to how Governance Domains and catalog assets are currently associated in Microsoft Purview.

For a definitive answer on whether child-domain assets can be surfaced automatically from a parent Governance Domain, I recommend checking the current Purview documentation for Governance Domains and submitting the requirement as a product feedback request if hierarchical asset roll-up is not currently supported.

For organizations with deeper domain structures, a practical approach is to:

Keep Governance Domain hierarchies as simple as possible.

Assign each Data Product, Glossary Term, and other catalog asset to its appropriate governance domain.

Use consistent naming and metadata to improve discovery.

Avoid duplicating the same asset across multiple domains solely for discoverability.

If your organization specifically requires a parent domain to display assets from all descendant domains, this would be a useful capability to raise with the Purview product team as a feature request.

If anyone from the Purview team can confirm whether descendant-asset roll-up is currently supported or planned, that would clarify the expected behavior.

Hi @Sam Gregory ,

The behavior described is expected based on how Governance Domains are currently associated with catalog assets. The parent-child relationship between Governance Domains does not, by itself, mean that Data Products, Glossary Terms, or other business concepts assigned to a child domain are automatically surfaced in the parent domain.

For organisations using deeper Governance Domain hierarchies, there are a few practical options:

Keep the Governance Domain hierarchy as simple as possible and avoid unnecessary levels.

Assign each Data Product, Glossary Term, and other asset to the Governance Domain that owns or governs it.

Use consistent naming, descriptions, glossary relationships, and metadata to improve search and discovery.

Use Unified Catalog search and filters to locate assets across Governance Domains instead of relying only on the parent domain view.

Avoid duplicating assets across domains purely to make them visible from a parent domain.

I could not find current Microsoft documentation confirming that automatic descendant-asset roll-up into a parent Governance Domain is supported or that it has a committed roadmap date.

If your requirement is specifically for a parent Governance Domain to automatically surface all Data Products, Glossary Terms, and other assets belonging to its descendant domains, I would recommend submitting this as a Microsoft Purview product feedback/feature request. Include the impact of having to navigate multiple levels of the hierarchy, especially where the organisation has several levels of Governance Domains.

A confirmation from the Purview product team would be needed to determine whether this capability is currently planned.