What type of metadata does the Catalog Service API expose?

The Catalog Service API primarily exposes metadata related to data location and lineage. This is crucial for organizations that need to understand where their data is stored, how it is organized, and the journey that data has taken from its origin to its current state. Understanding the data lineage helps in ensuring data quality, compliance, and governance by providing insights into the transformations and processes the data has undergone.

Accessing metadata about data location enables users to locate datasets easily, which is essential for data analysis and decision-making processes. Furthermore, knowing the lineage assists data analysts and IT professionals in tracing data back to its source, ensuring transparency and accountability in data handling.

The other options, while important aspects of data management, do not represent the primary focus of the Catalog Service API. For instance, physical data structures refer to how the data is stored physically rather than its metadata. User access history pertains to tracking how users interact with the data and is not typically handled by the Catalog Service API. Data processing rules would involve the governance and operational aspects of how the data is manipulated or transformed, which is also not the main concern of the Catalog service.