Data Commons:
Linking the world’s public datasets

Today’s web contains billions of files of various formats hosted on computers scattered all over the world. Finding relevant files would be insanely difficult without the invention of the World Wide Web, the web browser, and search engines. The Web allowed pages to link to one another, creating a web of documents. The web browser gave users the ability to view and intuitively navigate through the web. Search engines made it easy to find relevant files. Together, the web, the browser, and the search engine give users a simple and unified browsing experience for files.

Similarly, today we have many little datasets all over the web. We need the analogs of a single web and search engine to give the developer the ability to pretend that all of this data, across billions of files, are all in a single local database. We call the system that does this “Data Commons”.

What is Data Commons?

Data Commons is an open effort to build a Web of machine understandable data, similar to today’s Web of human understandable documents, by organizing structured data into a single graph that seamlessly relates disparate data sources and reduces the cost of using data.

The Data Commons Graph of structured data:

  1. is a graph: though the information may come from different publishers and sources, they are all unified under a common organization easily represented as a graph.
  2. contains structured data: Data Commons enforces a degree of structure provided by standardized schemas in order to make its information programmatically accessible.
  3. is open: built by extending the and is open sourced

Towards these three goals, the Data Commons Graph is synthesized from disparate data sources, linking references to the same entities across these different datasets to nodes on the graph. By connecting datasets in this way, Data Commons allows for fast analysis across datasets with unbounded degrees of separation. As a community effort, Data Commons could significantly reduce the work required for impactful data analysis, as well as duplicate work spent on data curation.

What does this look like in practice?

Example Data Commons Subgraph

The Data Commons Graph (DCG) stores information on entities (represented as nodes in the graph above) such as Oakland and Berkeley, Alameda County, California, and the USA. The information is encoded as statements such as

  • Oakland is containedInPlace Alameda County
  • Berkeley is the location of a population of Households with annual income between $30,000 and $34,999
  • California was the location of an US Senate Election for California in 2012

Each statement contains two entities that are related by a property (represented as edges in the graph above). Indeed, what is meant by structured data is that all information is encoded as statements of this form. This graph is also unified in the sense that data, regardless of where it is sourced, gets surfaced as a single representation. The fact that Berkeley and Oakland are contained in Alameda County which is contained in California which is contained in the United States is given by Wikidata. Meanwhile, the fact that there were 1331 households making between $30,000 and $34,999 in Berkeley in 2017 is given by the US Census.

As a final note, the type of entities in the DCG and the properties that relate these entities together is standardized through the Data Commons data model.

Why Data Commons?

An increasing number of the pieces required to build an application are now “horizontal”: not specific to the application. Everything from storage and networking to the client are available as a service. However, data pipelines are still remarkably vertical. The same data gets collected, normalized, stored, integrated, etc. over and over again, often poorly. The cost of getting the data into a form usable for analysis or modeling and keeping it updated often doesn’t justify the (possibly yet unknown) benefits. While there will always be some data proprietary to some applications, there is an opportunity to make the commonly used data available as a service.

Large datasets are behind many of today’s machine learning “wins”. As public cloud infrastructure of compute, storage, networking get commoditized, the platform that wins will be the one that makes it easy to work with large relevant datasets. Easy access to structured data becomes even more important as machine learning grows beyond perception to domains involving places, organizations, products, etc. Using the Data Commons Graph, in conjunction with their own data, we will enable researchers, data scientists, and students to analyse data, generate insights and make decisions in a super simple manner.

What Can Data Commons Do Today?

The Data Commons team has “jump-started” the DCG with data from publicly available sources like the US Census, Eurostat, OECD, World Bank, FBI, CDC, BLS, FEC, and others (see the complete list here). We welcome all to build interesting and impactful applications using Data Commons.

If you want to find how prevalent obesity is in US Cities or analyze genomic data - you can do that now with relatively little effort, without cleaning up disparate datasets with different schema or writing complex joins across tables.

Analysis that used to take weeks of tedious work is now reduced to days.

Get Involved

Join the discussion on GitHub.