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CONCEPT Cited by 1 source

Governance-aware ranking

Governance-aware ranking is the discipline of fusing semantic- similarity scores (retrieval relevance) with governance metadata (table tier, freshness, documentation completeness, ownership) when ranking retrieval candidates, so the system surfaces not just relevant results but trustworthy ones.

(Source: sources/2026-03-06-pinterest-unified-context-intent-embeddings-for-scalable-text-to-sql.)

The problem it solves

Semantic retrieval alone surfaces tables that look similar to the user's question. But in a 100,000-table warehouse, "similar" includes staging tables, deprecated legacy tables, undocumented team-owned tables, and production Tier-1 tables all mixed together. Pinterest names the failure: "the system surfaces not just relevant tables, but deprecated or undocumented alternatives."

The fusion

Pinterest's Analytics Agent fuses similarity with trust signals:

  • Table tier — Tier 1 / Tier 2 / Tier 3. Tier-1 tables rank higher.
  • Data freshness — recent data ranks higher than stale.
  • Documentation completeness — well-documented tables rank higher.
  • Active ownership — tables with active owners rank higher than orphans.
  • Usage signals — query success rates, recency, volume, author expertise (aggregated from query execution metadata).

Pinterest's framing: "A Tier-1 table with active ownership and fresh data ranks higher than a semantically similar but deprecated or undocumented alternative."

Prerequisites

Governance-aware ranking only works if the governance metadata actually exists and is kept current. This is why PinCat + the 400K→~100K table governance cleanup + AI-generated documentation are load-bearing prerequisites for the ranking approach — not just nice-to-haves.

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