Four and a half months ago, egeria-workspaces was one working demo. Since the v6.02 tag on April 2nd, it’s grown into a small constellation of purpose-built apps over Egeria’s metadata — plus the time-travel, bulk governance actions, and declarative dashboards that make them trustworthy.
This is the 6.1 release.
TRY IT YOURSELF
The live demo is open to anyone: egeria.pdr-associates.com — register free, pick a persona from our fictional Coco Pharmaceuticals, and explore a fully pre-loaded Egeria environment in your browser. No install. If you’d rather run it locally, Getting Started is on the repo: github.com/odpi/egeria-workspaces. And if you like video better than reading, three quick ones:
- Quickstart — Egeria up and running in under 2 minutes: youtube.com/watch?v=1Sfu5mHA1u8
- Accessing Egeria’s Demo Environment: youtube.com/watch?v=JV2UdEo1k8A
- Egeria Workspaces: youtube.com/watch?v=igIVACD4b_g
985 commits. 228 features. 227 fixes. Five new apps. Here’s the shape of it.
APRIL–MAY: A FRONT DOOR, AND A TOOL WORTH LIVING IN
We opened the period with QuickStart already running and Freshstart — the clean-slate, bring-your-own-metadata sibling environment — still mostly scaffolding. So the first two months went into giving both environments a real front door, and turning Egeria Explorer from a type browser into the app people actually reached for.
The type hierarchy stopped being a hand-maintained tree and started building *dynamically from Egeria’s own live type system*. Favorites (later renamed Bookmarks) rolled out across a dozen-plus element types, persisted in Egeria itself rather than a side database. Native Likes, Ratings, and Comments landed on every detail pane, alongside a separate user-feedback widget that persists to Postgres.
Obsidian joined the portal, running Dr.Egeria markdown against a live Coco Pharmaceuticals vault. And my-egeria — a Textual TUI served straight into the browser — became the portal’s first tile that wasn’t React at all.
MAY – JUNE: FOUR NEW ROOMS, AND A WORKING CLOCK
Egeria Explorer stopped being the only tool in the building. Four purpose-built apps shipped in quick succession:
- The Catalog — a dedicated technical asset catalog: infrastructure, data assets, APIs, processes, with tabular data preview.
- Egeria Operations — governance engines, engine actions, integration connectors, in one place.
- Egeria Audit — users, accounts, and a shared relationship viewer every later app reused.
- Lineage Explorer — data lineage centred on a focus asset, birthplace of the time-slider every other app later borrowed.
That time-slider is the real story. as_of_time — genuine time travel, not a UI trick — shipped for Data Assets, Digital Products, Collections, Locations, Communities, Perspectives, Glossary, Projects, and Actors. Each one verified against real before/after data. We also stopped passing passwords in URLs, and cut Jupyter loose from a public, multi-tenant Kroki service by self-hosting it.
JULY: SEARCH THAT MEANS IT, DASHBOARDS BUILT TO LAST
July had two headline efforts. Egeria Insights shipped as a proper cross-cutting governance search app (later renamed Query — because that’s what it actually does). And Egeria Overview arrived as a KPI dashboard for the whole demo, built on a real architecture instead of a page of hand-coded numbers: every tile is a declarative pyegeria FormatSet object, one source of truth instead of six hand-synced places.
Maybe the sleeper feature of the whole quarter: you can now run a Dr.Egeria markdown document straight from the browser. No terminal access needed. Just paste, validate, process.
AUGUST: DASHBOARDS FOR EVERYONE, AND CLOSING THE GAP
August was two things happening at once. The reporting model from July went out to actual users — Local Dashboards, where anyone can build a dashboard from a markdown file, with sparkline KPI tiles and drill-down navigation. Bulk governance actions grew from “add to collection” into zone membership and then classify/declassify across thirty-plus views. HTTPS went on by default everywhere.
And in parallel, a much less glamorous but arguably more important thread went back through Freshstart line by line, closing the gap that four months of quickstart-first development had quietly opened. Real drift, not cosmetic gaps — including one bug that reintroduced the exact class of error our own engineering conventions exist to prevent.
UNDERNEATH ALL OF IT
227 fixes shipped alongside the 228 features — real production concerns, not polish. A Postgres connection leak that periodically took Operations offline. A recurring pattern of methods that silently ignored the time-travel parameter we’d just built. And a shared component library that grew from an idea into the thing five-plus apps in both environments actually import from now, closing years of copy-paste drift.
EXPECT MORE
Egeria Workspaces, and the Portal tools will continue to evolve and expand. We are adding more views, refining and extending analytics, and adding more Coco Pharmaceuticals scenarios. In addition, we are actively working on our AI enhanced applications – Egeria Advisor and Resource Explorer, which you can find in the egeria-trellis repo.
Thanks to everyone who contributed this season, especially Mandy Chessell for the steady stream of Egeria core enhancements and fixes that made a lot of this possible.
Come see it running: egeria.pdr-associates.com
Resource Explorer is in there too — the tool for surveying repositories, databases and filesystems before they are catalogued. We are writing it up as its own series, starting with Active Surveying Beyond the Catalog Perimeter.