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Data Portal

Support Pages, Data Catalog, and Data Dictionary.

Capabilities

Ideas drawn from DataSF Support Pages

A set of pages to help people:

  1. Find data
  2. Integrate data into their tools
    • excel
    • tableau
    • etc.

Serve as a data catalog and data dictionary.

Data Catalog

A searchable list of data sources for discovering available data.

Resources

Data Dictionary

A set of wiki-like pages that provides information about available data.

Warby Parker used an internally hosted gitbook to disseminate information about datasets.

Resources

  • Wikipedia - Data Dictionary

  • Dan Woods - "Why You Can't Be Data-driven Without A Data Catalog"

    In conversations with Carl Anderson, director of data science at Warby Parker, I discovered an elegant approach based on creating an integrated model. Anderson and his team did exhaustive research about the concepts used by executives and analysts to describe and understand business activity. Much of this knowledge was embedded in spreadsheet formulas or handcrafted SQL. Anderson and his team worked with each department to create a common definition of concepts like customer, product and revenue. Often, two distinct definitions were needed because marketing and finance think of the customer differently. In the end, Anderson created a shared, integrated and explorable model using Looker, which brought all departments to a common understanding. A data dictionary stored in GitBook described all the data fields and definitions and showed where to find them in Looker. (See “The Warby Parker Data Book” for why GitBook was chosen.) This type of approach is just one of many lessons you can learn from Anderson’s book, Creating a Data Driven Organization.