# Document Ownership

### New documents are owned by specific users, rather than being implicitly owned by the whole organization.

Ownership provides a clear path for managing data and ensures that access is intentional. For documents brought into Katara through loaders, the system tracks which user is responsible for that content.

### Who is the Owner?

The owner of a document is determined at the time of creation:

* **Loader Imports**: The user who created the loader that imported the document is assigned as the owner.

### Ownership Transfer

Ownership can be transferred when responsibility for a document changes.

* **Document Owners**: Can hand off ownership when another user should manage the document going forward.
* **Organization Admins and Owners**: Can transfer ownership when they need to manage access across the organization.
* **Same Organization Only**: Ownership transfers stay within the same organization.

### Roles and Ownership

It's important to distinguish between organization-level roles and document ownership:

* **Document Owner**: The specific user responsible for a document. They have full control over [sharing](/about/corpuses/what-is-a-corpus/sharing.md) and [sensitivity classification](/about/corpuses/what-is-a-corpus/sensitivity-classification.md) for that document.
* **Organization Owner/Admin**: These roles have broad management authority over the entire organization. While they are not the "owner" of every individual document, they can manage resources and, if necessary, transfer document ownership to another active member.

### Legacy Documents

Documents imported before these ownership features were introduced are considered legacy documents.

* **Behavior**: Legacy documents remain visible to the entire organization, maintaining their original access pattern.
* **Transition**: You can explicitly assign an owner to a legacy document to bring it into the new ownership-based model. Once an owner is assigned, the document follows the standard [visibility](/about/corpuses/what-is-a-corpus/visibility.md) and [sharing](/about/corpuses/what-is-a-corpus/sharing.md) rules.


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