data.world October Product Launch


The October release of data.world brings a wide variety of new capabilities and improvements across the platform – read on to learn more about the GA of Databricks Publisher, new collectors for MongoDB and Alteryx, Okta support in SCIM, the GA of the improved search experience, and more!

Additionally, we highlight some changes made to the data.world Open Data Community to improve privacy and preserve the quality of open data and the user experience.


Databricks Publisher Premium Automation

We’re excited to announce the GA launch of the Databricks Publisher Premium Automation! This new feature allows users to seamlessly publish metadata from data.world to Databricks, simplifying the process of managing and synchronizing key data attributes. Specifically, users can now automatically publish table and column descriptions from data.world to Databricks and push selected metadata attributes as Databricks tags. Whether you prefer manual updates or fully automated syncing, this automation ensures that metadata remains consistent between platforms, reducing manual effort and improving data integrity. With data.world now acting as the source of truth, your metadata stays up-to-date across systems effortlessly.

For more information, see the product documentation.


New MongoDB and Alteryx Collectors

This month, we’re excited to announce new MongoDB and Alteryx Collectors, both available in Private Preview. If you’re interested in early access to either of these new collectors, please reach out to your Customer Service Director.

MongoDB Collector

The MongoDB Collector catalogs metadata from MongoDB, helping maintain a comprehensive inventory of MongoDB assets, facilitating better governance, discovery, and utilization of data across your organization.

This collector harvests metadata for MongoDB databases, collections, views, indexes and more.

An example collection from MongoDB

Alteryx Collector

The Alteryx Collector catalogs metadata from Alteryx, helping maintain a comprehensive inventory of Alteryx assets, facilitating better governance, discovery, and utilization of data across your organization.

This collector harvests metadata for workflows, workflow nodes, workflow jobs, connections, schedules and more.

An example collection from Alteryx


Improved lineage for SQL Server

The SQL Server Collector now collects additional lineage relationships not previously captured through SQL parsing using built-in SQL Server functions that describe relationships between objects (such as, in some cases, the columns and tables referenced by views or stored procedures).

For more information and detail, see the description of lineage collected by the SQL Server Collector in the product documentation.


Support for Okta in SCIM

The active Private Preview of SCIM (System for Cross-domain Identity Management) now additionally supports Okta (in addition to Microsoft Entra ID), allowing customers who use Okta as their enterprise identity provider to have automated management of users and groups in data.world.

If you are interested in being part of the SCIM Private Preview, or just want to learn more, please reach out to your Customer Service Director.


Webhook Authorization enhancement

Webhooks now support an optional authorization key parameter to help consuming applications verify the origin and permissions for an incoming webhook. Learn more


Collection Details in Technical Reference

By popular request, the Technical Reference page for catalog resources now includes details about the collections the resource belongs to. Learn more


Relative Time Advanced Search Syntax

Create powerful saved searches for resources by updated and created dates using three new relative time options:

  • `created:today` 
  • `updated:yesterday`
  • `created:{last 30 days}`

See the product documentation on creating advanced searches to learn more.


UX Improvements

Adding the new search experience to Organizations: Our new search experience has been a big hit with users. It’s faster, cleaner, and provides more advanced features in the UI. We've fully retired the classic experience and brought the new search features to the Resources, Glossary and Collection landing pages.


Coming Soon! Advanced relationship editing: We're adding new improvements that make it easier to find the right resources and add or remove more than one relationship at a time.


Coming Soon! More look-and-feel updates: Next up in our work to update and modernize our UI, we'll be swapping the old default avatars to a newer color palette and default avatar design that utilizes letters. This change will also provide a more accessible experience as it gives users the ability to distinguish users and organizations using letters.


Changes to data.world Open Data Community

data.world Open Data Community profiles, datasets, and projects now behind a login wall: To better control the privacy of our users and to protect the effectiveness of the content on our active Open Data Community, we have made the decision to restrict access to profiles, datasets, and projects to account holders. It is always free to join our open data community. 

data.world Open Data Community commenting restrictions: Commenting is now restricted to contributors on datasets and projects in the data.world Open Data Community. Organizations can enable comments on their public datasets through organization settings. This feature is not available or enforced for Enterprise customers on private instance or VPC deployments.


Preview our latest navigation changes

The data.world enterprise catalog provides a 360-degree view of your data resources and semantics. Available in preview today, we've added quick section navigation links on the overview tab of your collection, resource, and glossary pages and separated related resources into their own, sortable, searchable views.

With this upcoming change, users will be able to scan the available metadata and get the insights needed to make decisions efficiently and effectively.


These views offer a highly organized and condensed presentation of the metadata, making it easier to quickly access and understand the information.



We'd love your feedback and thoughts before we roll them into the main UI. To see the views, please click "Turn on preview" in the banner at the top of any collection, resource, or glossary term page. To leave your feedback, please visit the help section (question mark in the lower left of the global navigation) and leave a suggestion via the support link.


You can read more about these changes in our documentation portal. If you're interested in learning more about our data discovery solutions, please visit our website and book a demo or reach out to your customer service representative today. We look forward to helping you and your teams discover your data!

New navigation improvements ready for preview

We are excited to begin rolling out for preview some exciting ENHANCEMENTS to the user experience on our collections, metadata resources, and glossary pages.

Today, you'll notice a new PREVIEW button on these pages. Click on it to get a preview of some of our latest features.

feature 

  • Metadata sections navigation - a table-of-contents-like side menu for easy access to your metadata sections, related resources, etc.
  • Collection hierarchy widget - a navigable tree of your data taxonomy.


COMING SOON 

  • Relationships UX improvements  - a more information-rich view of the related resources, improved edit/suggest flows.
  • Custom icons - dress your custom types in attire that makes sense to you and your catalog users.

To find out more about these new navigation features, please visit our documentation portal.

Updated documentation portal

We are excited to announce upcoming improvements to our help docs portal, including streamlining and consolidating our product documentation, cleaning up deprecated articles and links, and improving the navigation and search experience!

With the site improvements, some of your bookmarks or saved links may no longer work. We have diligently mapped deprecated URLs to the new pags to keep the impact on our users as low as possible. 

If you encounter a link that no longer works, the easiest way to find what you need is to go to the docs portal landing page and search for the information. Please contact support with any questions of issues.

Preview the simplified navigation and Discover page

This May, data.world’s navigation is getting more powerful and even easier to use – we’re adding a Discover button! Preview the changes today to discover all the resources you have access to with a single click.

Screenshot of data.world Discover page. The familiar search page shows a list of all the resources you have access to, available via the Discover left hand navigation. In this screenshot, Discover is highlighted in purple and a Preview banner is at the top of the page.

  • Discover will be added to the navigation to show you all the resources that you can find.
  • Data, Analysis, and Glossary will be removed from the navigation.


The Discover experience transforms the empty search page into an actionable entry point for all of your resources—whether organization-owned or in the open community.

Screenshot of data.world Discover page on the All tab. After a prompt to "Search for bookmarks, resources, or people" there is a list of your recently viewed resources. In this screenshot, Discover is highlighted in purple and a Preview banner is at the top of the page.

Switch to the All tab to reference up to 25 of your recently viewed resources and jump back in where you left off.


Look for the Preview banner to try out the new navigation and Discover experience today. Review the updated documentation or share your feedback.

Coming Soon: Improved Home Page

In March, a new and improved home page is coming to data.world.

Screenshot of the data.world new home page, featuring sections to quickly navigate to your organizations, recent activity, pending alerts, and more.

The new home page will feature personalized views to help you quickly access resources and view alerts. It will also give you a reliable home base to explore and come back to.

Screenshot of the data.world new home page, featuring sections for a new user with Getting Started tips and links to helpful resources.

To preview the new home page experience, look for the coming soon banner when you log into data.world.

Screenshot of the data.world current home page, with a feed of recent activity in the center and quick links on the side.

Coming Soon: Core Navigation Changes

In January, the updated Organization Profile Page will replace existing organization-specific landing pages with a consolidated experience.

Organization members and admins will be able to search, create, and manage resources, collections, members, connections, and more in one place.

Informational banner which reads "Updates to the organization page are coming soon. Check out what this page will look like in the new version."

Landing pages that will be replaced with the new Organization Profile Page will feature a banner with a link to preview the new experience.


The organization landing page will redirect to the new Organization Profile Page.

Now
Coming Soon
The current organization landing page, featuring large tiles with different resource types.
The new organization profile page, with multiple tabs of information and more details.


Organization-specific library and list views will redirect to the Resources tab on the new Organization Profile page, with more advanced filtering options.

Now
Coming Soon
The current organization data catalog, with simple rows of tables and minimal filter options.
The new organization resources tab, with more information on each table and advanced filtering options.


For enterprise organizations, the Glossary landing page will redirect to a new Glossary tab on the Organization page, also with improved filtering options.

NowComing Soon

Coming Soon: Organization Profile Updates

The Organization Profile Page is getting a facelift this week to offer more intuitive navigation, stronger support for custom catalog types, and richer discovery features. 

Browse the Overview tab for quick links to different resource categories in your catalog. The quick link tiles will take you to a filtered presentation of the new Resources tab. This view operates much like the main search page with support for facets and advanced search syntax, all scoped to your organization's resources. 

Searching for open data? Community organizations will now also have these search and filter options available on the new Resources tab.


Coming Soon: Concept Cards

Business context

Most analysts trying to find answers to business questions aren’t searching for tables and columns directly. What they are actually looking for is contextual information that accelerates time to business impact for data. data.world Concept Cards will change the way data consumers access data by providing a unique search experience no other catalog provider does or can do without the backing of a knowledge graph.

Capabilities

Concept Cards are a feature on data.world’s near-term roadmap to help users discover related people, resources, and other supporting information we can obtain from the knowledge graph about a given search topic. If there are suggested actions that can be taken for the topic itself or for related resources, access to those actions is surfaced directly in the search results.

These cards become a jumping off point to browse and discover new things on the platform that share something in common with the search topic of interest. We see these Concept Cards as the first of many intelligent recommendations we can make by harnessing the power of the knowledge graph.

🚨 Default Behavior Change: PATCH API endpoints 🚨

The data.world public API supports several options for programmatically making updates to resources on the platform. PATCH is a method for making partial updates to individual records, such as adding tags, changing a description, or modifying a title.

In the next two weeks, we will be making a change to the way PATCH endpoints modify list values. We outline these changes below.


Existing Merge Behavior

Lists are merged with existing values on PATCH requests

  1. A dataset has tags: [tag A , tag B
  2. A PATCH request is sent to /datasets/democorp/my-example-dataset with body: { "tags": [ "tag C", "tag D" ]  }
  3. The dataset is updated to reflect tags: [ tag A, tag B, tag C ,tag D]
  4. A PATCH request is sent to /datasets/democorp/my-example-dataset with payload: { "tags": []  }
  5. No change is applied and the tags remain: [ tag A, tag B, tag C ,tag D]


New Replace Behavior

Lists replace existing values on PATCH requests

  1. A dataset has tags: [tag A , tag B
  2. A PATCH request is sent to /datasets/democorp/my-example-dataset with body: { "tags": [ "tag C", "tag D" ]  }
  3. The dataset is now updated to have tags: [ tag C ,tag D].  tag A and tag B have been removed.
  4. I send a PATCH request to /datasets/democorp/my-example-dataset with body: { "tags": []  }
  5. The dataset has been updated to remove all tags.


Why we are making this change

Today, PATCH can be used to add, modify, or remove fields for all non-list values. With the current merge logic, items can only be appended to list values using PATCH. As a consequence, if you want to remove or reorder the items in a list, you must use the PUT method, which does not support partial updates and requires a full overwrite of the existing record. The new logic to overwrite list values will allow users to make partial updates to records that remove or modify the order of items in the list without needing to modify the entire record.

This new logic primarily impacts tags, file labels, collections, and multi-select custom metadata fields.

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