The way people discover information today is very mundane. You either have a folder or SharePoint site where you know your colleagues have placed information for you. You can search or browse to find the right information and that might work OK. You might use Bing to look for information relevant to the data solution you are trying to build. You might subscribe to a premium data provider that provides valuable data for the business or industry you are in.

All of these experiences are fine, we can make it work – but we believe it can be better. This current experience of searching, finding then understanding how to use this data – isn’t optimal. Our goal is to make that experience much better. We believe that if done right, information comes to you. You don’t have to go look for it.

This of course is accomplished through a variety of ways. The following are examples:

  1. What you are working on – by way of semantic classification (understand the nouns of the data you are working with), columns and column groups – we can start to understand your intent.
  2. Who you are – a profile that helps us understand what data is important to you.
  3. Who you work with – by understanding the data connections between users within a company, or group of people, we can connect you to the most relevant information, from trusted sources.
  4. Where is your data currently stored – the service can crawl and discover related data from a variety of data stores (file folders, SharePoint sites, SkyDrive, etc.)

 

At PASS Summit 2011 we showed an example of this capability. In our early releases, we are bringing you relevant data from Windows Azure MarketPlace. Going forward, we plan to bring you relevant data from within your company, too.

Our goals and vision don’t stop there, either. We believe that we can show you how to join on the data. We can show you how that data might look in a chart or graph. We can also let you know that there are strong and interesting correlations between your data and another data source, somewhere in this ecosystem you are part of.

We hope you really enjoy our early Lab release of Data Explorer. Over time our service will become much smarter and cover a more robust set of data and solutions. We are listening and really looking forward to your feedback!

We also hope you enjoy the latest video added to our Youtube channel, which talks about recommendations and data discovery…