Summary

We have tools and platforms for collaborating on software projects and linking them together, wouldn’t it be nice to have the same capabilities for data? The team at data.world are working on building a platform to host and share data sets for public and private use that can be linked together to build a semantic web of information. The CTO, Bryon Jacob, discusses how the company got started, their mission, and how they have built and evolved their technical infrastructure.

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Preamble

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data infrastructure

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This is your host Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Bryon Jacob about the technology and purpose that drive data.world

Interview

Introduction

How did you first get involved in the area of data management?

What is data.world and what is its mission and how does your status as a B Corporation tie into that?

The platform that you have built provides hosting for a large variety of data sizes and types. What does the technical infrastructure consist of and how has that architecture evolved from when you first launched?

What are some of the scaling problems that you have had to deal with as the amount and variety of data that you host has increased?

What are some of the technical challenges that you have been faced with that are unique to the task of hosting a heterogeneous assortment of data sets that intended for shared use?

How do you deal with issues of privacy or compliance associated with data sets that are submitted to the platform?

What are some of the improvements or new capabilities that you are planning to implement as part of the data.world platform?

What are the projects or companies that you consider to be your competitors?

What are some of the most interesting or unexpected uses of the data.world platform that you are aware of?

Contact Information

@bryonjacob on Twitter

bryonjacob on GitHub

LinkedIn

Parting Question

From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today?

Links

The intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA

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