It’s clear that the modern world suffers no shortage of data, but it is often very difficult for organizations to make good use of that data.  It makes the launch recently of a network for people to tap into previously un-used algorithms so exciting, as it gives us all better access to a large chunk of intellectual property to try and make sense of the data we have access to.

Of course, using sites such as this relies upon you having data scientists at hand to know enough about the kind of algorithms you need, or could use, to make sense of your data, and then turn that analysis into commercial solutions, and data scientists are in rather short supply around the world.

Step forward Adatao.  Adatao is a new site that aims to allow much greater connectivity and collaboration between organizations and data scientists.

The service offered by Adatao targets two distinct groups.  One is aimed at providing an interface for analysts, whilst the other allows people to create visual displays of a dataset.

The first of these combines an Apache Hadoop dataset with an API to allow data scientists to plug information they have into applications, to thus make the data much easier to understand for non-data savvy colleagues elsewhere in their organization.

Those colleagues can then use the second part of Adatao to build charts, maps and various other interactive wizardry to both bring the data to life a little and also aid decision making based upon the data.

The site also has a collaborative element to it, so multiple employees can go to work on a visual document at the same time, whilst there are also communication tools to help them to communicate effectively with the data scientists.  There is also a natural language querying engine that will allow people to conduct searches relatively easily should they wish to jump straight in without having a data scientist guide them.

The aim is that having this kind of facility will allow better data analysis to take place in one place by allowing better collaboration between departments.

Check out the video below for a bit more on the platform.