Today, we are excited to share that Data Commons is accessible via natural language queries in Google search. At a time when data informs our understanding of so many issues–from public health and education to the evolving workforce and more–access to data has never been more important. Data Commons in Google search is a step in this direction, enabling users to explore data without the need for expertise or programming skills.
Three years ago, the Data Commons journey started at Google with a simple observation: our ability to use data to understand our world is frequently hampered by the difficulties in working with data. The difficulties of finding, cleaning and joining datasets effectively limit who gets to work with data.
Data Commons addresses this challenge head on, performing the tedious tasks of curating, joining and cleaning data sets at scale so that data users don’t have to. The result? Large scale and cloud accessible APIs to clean and normalize data originating from some of the most widely used datasets, including those from the US Census, World Bank, CDC and more. Available as a layer on top of the Knowledge Graph, Data Commons is now accessible to a much wider audience.
Data Commons is Open. Open Data, Open Source. We hope that like its elder sister Schema.org, it becomes one of the foundational layers of the Web. We know this can only happen if it is built in an open and collaborative fashion. We are actively looking for partnerships on every aspect of this project, and we look forward to hearing from you!
R.V.Guha & the Data Commons team