After you create a project, or join one, the next step is to add data to the project and prepare the data for analysis.

Required permissions

You must have the Admin or Editor role in a project to add or prepare data.

You can add data assets from your local system, from a catalog, from the Resource hub, or from connections to data sources. See Adding data to a project.

You can add these types of data assets to a project:

• Data assets from files from your local system, including structured data, unstructured data, and images. The files are stored in the project's IBM Cloud Object Storage bucket.
• Connection assets that contain information for connecting to data sources. You can add connections to IBM or third-party data sources. See Connectors.
• Connected data assets that specify a table, view, or file that is accessed through a connection to a data source.
• Connected folder assets that specify a path in IBM Cloud Object Storage.

To get started quickly, take a tutorial. See Quick start tutorials.

To refine data by cleansing and shaping it, you can:

• Select the Prepare data tile on your watsonx home page.
• Add the data to the project, then open the data asset and click Prepare data.

To manage feature groups for a data asset, open the data asset and go to its Feature group page.

To create synthetic data, you can:

• Select the Prepare data tile on your watsonx home page.
• Select the Generate synthetic tabular data tile.

To associate grounding documents with a foundation model prompt to help with retrieval-augmented generation tasks, you can:

• From the project overview, click the Assets tab, and then choose New asset > Ground gen AI with vectorized documents.