Amazon S3 document metadata

You can add metadata, additional information about a document, to documents in an Amazon S3 bucket using a metadata file. Each metadata file is associated with an indexed document.

Your metadata files must be stored in the same bucket as your indexed files. You can specify a location within the bucket for your metadata files using the console or the S3Prefix field of the DocumentsMetadataConfiguration parameter when you create an Amazon S3 data source. If you don't specify an Amazon S3 prefix, your metadata files must be stored in the same location as your indexed documents.

If you specify an Amazon S3 prefix for your metadata files, they are in a directory structure parallel to your indexed documents. Amazon Kendra looks only in the specified directory for your metadata. If the metadata isn't read, check that the directory location matches the location of your metadata.

The following examples show how the indexed document location maps to the metadata file location. Note that the document's Amazon S3 key is appended to the metadata's Amazon S3 prefix and then suffixed with .metadata.json to form the metadata file's Amazon S3 path. The combined Amazon S3 key, with the metadata's Amazon S3 prefix and .metadata.json suffix must be no more than a total of 1024 characters. It is recommended that you keep your Amazon S3 key below 1000 characters to account for addtional characters when combining your key with the prefix and suffix.

Bucket name:
     s3://bucketName
Document path:
     documents
Metadata path:
     none
File mapping
     s3://bucketName/documents/file.txt -> 
        s3://bucketName/documents/file.txt.metadata.json

Bucket name:
     s3://bucketName
Document path:
     documents/legal
Metadata path:
     metadata
File mapping
     s3://bucketName/documents/legal/file.txt -> 
        s3://bucketName/metadata/documents/legal/file.txt.metadata.json

Your document metadata is defined in a JSON file. The file must be a UTF-8 text file without a BOM marker. The file name of the JSON file must be <document>.<extension>.metadata.json. In this example, "document" is the name of the document that the metadata applies to and "extension" is the file extension for the document. The document ID must be unique in <document>.<extension>.metadata.json.

The content of the JSON file follows this template. All of the attributes/fields are optional, so it's not necessary to include all attributes. You must provide a value for each attribute you want to include; the value cannot be empty. If you don't specify the _source_uri, then the links returned by Amazon Kendra in the search results point to the Amazon S3 bucket that contains the document. DocumentId is mapped to the field s3_document_id and is the absolute path to the document in S3.

{
    "DocumentId": "S3 document ID, the S3 path to doc",
    "Attributes": {
        "_category": "document category",
        "_created_at": "ISO 8601 encoded string",
        "_last_updated_at": "ISO 8601 encoded string",
        "_source_uri": "document URI",
        "_version": "file version",
        "_view_count": number of times document has been viewed,
        "custom attribute key": "custom attribute value",
        additional custom attributes
    },
    "AccessControlList": [
         {
             "Name": "user name",
             "Type": "GROUP | USER",
             "Access": "ALLOW | DENY"
         }
    ],
    "Title": "document title",
    "ContentType": "For example HTML | PDF. For supported content types, see Types of documents."
}

The _created_at and _last_updated_at metadata fields are ISO 8601 encoded dates. For example, 2012-03-25T12:30:10+01:00 is the ISO 8601 date-time format for March 25, 2012, at 12:30PM (plus 10 seconds) in the Central European Time time zone.

You can add additional information to the Attributes field about a document that you use to filter queries or to group query responses. For more information, see Creating custom document fields.

You can use the AccessControlList field to filter the response from a query. This way, only certain users and groups have access to documents. For more information, see Filtering on user context.