If we’re lucky, data journalism, as a distinct and rare focus within journalism, is not long for this world. This is the effect of democratization. When technical skills begin to take hold in any industry, a familiar pattern plays out. Because of high barriers to...
data catalog
Try this: Frictionless data.world
A big part of our mission at data.world is to bring down barriers to data access — and in that spirit we are big fans of what the folks at Open Knowledge International are doing with Frictionless Data. In particular, the Tabular Data Package specification defines a...
Try This: File Hot Links
As a data.world user, imagine that you want to supplement a dataset with results from an online survey. Now, if you wanted to keep your dataset up-to-date with the latest responses, what would you do? Could you upload files manually to data.world as many times as...
JSON Exposed!
Introducing native support for JSON on data.world In recent years JSON has become the primary format for data exchange on the Internet. If you’ve queried data from an API on the web, or dug into your browser’s console, chances are you’ve seen it. JSON is great for...
What the data REALLY says about urban and rural Americans and how they voted
“The Great Urban-Rural Divide” If there is an urban-rural divide in American politics, it is far more pronounced in post-election headlines and quotes from anonymous party insiders than it is on the ground — or in the data. The Atlantic’s Ronald Brownstein pointed to...
APIs at data.world
UPDATE: Official documentation is here: docs.data.world/documentation/api/ The last week has been a real whirlwind. Early in the week, our cofounder Jon Loyens was interviewed on the Partially Derivative podcast. Then on Friday, we were featured on Product Hunt. What...
Data donation: What’s at stake?
If your company had data that could help save lives, or feed the hungry, or slow global warming, or impact society in any significant way, what would you do with it? How many critical initiatives — and potential solutions to humanity’s biggest problems — die on the...
Jonathon Morgan on the data of extremism, exploratory visualization, and modeling complex human behaviors
Total militia group FB comments responding to Trumps “election is rigged” claims, by state. Get the data Much of the data Jonathon Morgan looks at these days is not for the faint of heart. Armed militias, delusional belief in a rigged election, white nationalism, Nazi...
30 Years of SQL
Perhaps hard to believe, but SQL is celebrating it’s 30th birthday! Top Gun, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Legend of Zelda, and Structured Query Language (or SQL)—were all released in 1986. What a year… So, what better way to celebrate than to enable SQL querying in...
Helping ordinary Americans solve tough problems with the Opportunity Project
My parents are immigrants. Both are doctors. American dream achieved, right? There’s more. Both of my siblings grew up to be doctors, too. At this point, it’s like we’re writing a patriotic PSA. I’m not a doctor, so I’ve never been entirely sure what role my character...
SPARQL Tutorial
tldr; Check our awesome SPARQL Tutorial! Do you know SPARQL? No? Don’t worry, you’re not alone. As a matter of fact, there’s a pretty good possibility that you’ve never even heard of SPARQL. Let’s see what Google says… SPARQL (pronounced “sparkle”, a recursive acronym...
Open data’s unsung heroes, evolving private sector appeal, ecosystem challenges — an interview with…
In a movement like open data, animated by the passion and skills of people who work tirelessly towards worthy ends, we are grateful that some of them — somehow — find the time to share what they think, and not just what they build. Leigh Dodds’s writing is candid,...
New feature: Topical dataset discussions
You may have noticed a few changes to the discussions feature on the data.world dataset pages. During the course of our research and user interviews, discussion, documentation, and commentary about data were identified as valuable context that get lost or locked away....
How a fictional data scientist helped us deliver on a massive opportunity
I read the email three times to make sure it meant what I thought it meant. It was an unsolicited invitation to contribute a guest post to KDnuggets, one of the most popular data science blogs in the world. The editors had read about data.world, and wanted us to...
“Oooh, I can help with that!” What contribution means in data work
Collaboration and contribution are two of the most discussed concepts inside the data.world product team, and consequently the areas we’ve focused on the most in our user testing. A platform centered around user generated or contributed data needs to have a tight and...
Organizations on data.world
One of the most important factors in the success of a platform like data.world is what we call “data liquidity”. Central to our vision for data.world is to become the first stop to answer the question: “I wonder if there is a dataset about _________?”. The social...
Notebook Previews
One thing users have expressed repeatedly in our conversations is that data is more than facts and figures—it’s about telling a story. Tables and graphs are only interesting if they build to actionable insights. These stories are increasingly being created in Jupyter...
