The Namara Marketplace vs. Google Dataset Search
Data is the key to unlocking insights. But with the velocity and variety of today’s data, it’s difficult to pinpoint what you need to achieve your unique business goals. Data adds value not because you have it, but because you use it.
Let’s walk through how to find the data you want by comparing our Namara Marketplace and Google Dataset Search searching for NOAA weather data.
And in this corner…
The Namara Marketplace is the easiest point of access for hundreds of thousands of normalized, queryable datasets. It’s the first piece of the puzzle to unlock your organization’s data strategy.
Google Dataset Search is a search engine that helps researchers locate online data that is freely available for use.
Let the data discovery begin
We searched for “NOAA Global Historical Climatology Network Daily” on both platforms. To be fair, both tools solved one problem very effectively — out of the innumerable datasets out there, both Google and Namara make it easy to search for NOAA as a source and find the weather data we were looking for.
Now you’ve got data, right?
Not exactly. The difference between these two searches is everything after “finding” data. With Google Dataset Search, that’s the end of the road. You go to the source and you’re on your own. From there it’s connecting to the FTP server, writing a script, mapping, monitoring for changes…the list goes on.
With Namara, we present data that comes straight from the source, but which is automatically updated, normalized, filterable, queryable, and ready to be integrated into your projects, workflows, and tools.
What’s your preference — useable, cleansed data, or a raw, unmapped .csv?
Just scratching the surface
Navigating complicated portals, all with different methods of access, becomes incredibly tedious when connecting to a larger number of external sources. As you can see, the NOAA dataset looks vastly different when you compare the two results. Data can come in so many different formats, all with unique methods of access, keys, mappings — there’s a never-ending list of variables.
In fact, 80% of a data scientist’s time is spent finding, preparing, and cleansing data — and it’s not because the custodial work the best part of the job. When you’ve got raw, messy data, it has to be normalized and standardized to suit your organizations needs. Depending on where it’s coming from and what you’re using it for, there’s a lot of time and effort involved in transforming it into a usable data asset.
The verdict?
Both tools are effective when it comes to finding data. The Namara Marketplace, however, solves a host of other issues like access, freshness, and productionalization. Plugging into the Namara Marketplace means saving time that would otherwise go to script management, dataset QA, cleansing, and prepping.
The Namara Marketplace, as part of our entire platform, unlocks the full potential in any data by managing the entire data lifecycle for your organization.
With Namara, the data is accessible across your entire organization from a single source of truth. Role and access management make for easy collaboration and certain security.
Using data on Namara means that it exists in a dynamic environment, opening up the potential for the greatest possible access, action, and insights. Namara makes it easy to flow data into IDEs like Jupyter Notebooks or RStudio, intelligence platforms like Salesforce or Power BI, and visualization tools like Tableau or Mapbox.
Don’t just search for data, use it
Finding the dataset itself is a small bite of a big meal. Making the data usable and accessible across your organization is the real challenge, which makes Namara more than a dataset search, it’s an end-to-end data management solution.
Want to learn more about aligning your business and data strategy?
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Originally published at https://blog.thinkdataworks.com.
