US Patent 10303690 Automated identification and classification of critical data elements

A data governance method comprises the following steps. Data elements from data assets associated with an enterprise are obtained. One or more of the data elements are identified as one or more critical data elements based on a level of criticality computed for each of the one or more data elements. In illustrative embodiments, the level of criticality is based on one or more of: a cardinality computed for the one or more data elements; a business relevance criterion computed for the one or more data elements; and an indirect cross-data lake correlation criterion computed for the one or more data elements.