UPDATED 11:09 EDT / MARCH 16 2017

BIG DATA

The value of keeping metadata free and open

Too much data to crunch? The solution may be yet more data — cataloged with machine learning to make recommendations for use cases, says Adam Wilson, chief executive officer of Trifacta Inc.

“The data lake itself is not a use case,” he said at BigData SV 2017 in San Jose, CA. He said that while many companies jumped on the data lake bandwagon, “At some point people scratched their heads and said, ‘Well, wait a minute, what about the strategic asset that we were building that was going to change the way people worked with the data?'”

Wilson and Joe Hellerstein, chief strategy officer of Trifacta, spoke to John Furrier (@furrier) and George Gilbert (@ggilbert41), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, about Trifacta’s value proposition and how the company’s big data innovations focus on the user experience. (*Disclosure below.)

The company’s Trifacta Wrangler is a free product companies can use for self-serve analytics. In doing so, they generate metadata that Trifacta puts into the cloud, which adds value back into the product.

“We can use that as training data, that actually, as more people Wrangle, the product itself get smarter based on that,” he said.

Metadata democracy

It is important that metadata be both securely governed and vendor neutral, said Hellerstein, who is a professor at University of California, Berkeley where an open metadata platform called Ground has taken shape in the past year.

He also mentioned recent metadata projects from Hortonworks Inc. and Cloudera Inc. and said, “What would be a shame is if the two vendors ended up kind of pointing guns inward and kind of killing the metadata storage.”

Vendors can add value on top of open metadata with special cataloging or recommendation services, Hellerstein added.

While Ground is open and neutral, Hellerstein said it maintains some governance and security to protect company data. “Democratization is not anarchization,” he said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of BigData SV 2017. (*Disclosure: Some segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE are sponsored. Sponsors have no editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE

A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:

Your vote of support is important to us and it helps us keep the content FREE.

One click below supports our mission to provide free, deep, and relevant content.  

Join our community on YouTube

Join the community that includes more than 15,000 #CubeAlumni experts, including Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, and many more luminaries and experts.

“TheCUBE is an important partner to the industry. You guys really are a part of our events and we really appreciate you coming and I know people appreciate the content you create as well” – Andy Jassy

THANK YOU