Our years of experience working with clients and their data have given us great insight into the data management problems organisations face. In a data rich world, it is frustratingly difficult to find what you need. Our answer is Agora Catalog – where you can store and catalog data for your users, whether they have years of experience or are just starting out.
Agora Catalog is a simple to use data catalog that helps people find, understand and access your data. It allows your teams to catalog the datasets and services they create and manage. It provides ways to join datasets together, to share them, and to create communities around data.
Some of the problems we see:
- You know some data exists but, unless you know who to ask, it is hard to find or to understand how it can be used
- Creating metadata records and keeping them up to date requires repetitive and time-consuming manual work
- Data governance tasks are driven by individual datasets, rather than more manageable high-level groupings. The tools used for governance don’t provide useful information.
- Useful data is inaccessible because there is no central, obvious place to store it so others can find it
- Organisations have more than one catalog and they don’t talk to one another – meaning double entry of records
If you have these problems then Agora Catalog is for you:
- We have built a simple to use metadata catalog for datasets and data services (like APIs) that helps users find what they want and learn about it
- Records in the catalog can connect you to other people who have the knowledge you need
- You can favourite datasets and receive updates on changes as they happen
- You can bring datasets together in personal collections for easy future reference
- Your collections can help you to understand and manage data that you are responsible for
- If you have a piece of data that doesn’t have a home you can store it in the catalog along with its metadata record
- You can write your own code to write records into the catalog, take extracts and be notified of changes
In the future we’ll be adding other features:
- Crawlers that can find datasets across your IT estate and create/ update catalog records for them
- Support for more complex data structures like versioned or composite datasets or data series that keep all the components of a dataset together
- Federation of multiple catalogs so that records managed in one are synchronised across the others. This can be used to support departmental catalogs, or an internal catalog feeding a subset to a public catalog
Trial version available early 2023.
We are about to enter a private beta phase getting early feedback from potential users, with a public beta early in 2023.
If you’d be interested in learning more, or being involved in the beta, please get in touch.
