Best Data Curation Tools to Choose in The Machine Learning Age!

Data Curation at a Glance

Even before we get to understand what exactly data curation is, let’s first understand what curation is.

Let’s say, you visit a book store or a library and struggle to find what exactly you are looking for. Would you not call it a waste of time with your objective far from being accomplished? Here is where the word “curation” comes into the picture when all it means is – the action or process of organizing and storing items (in your case, books) in a manner that can easily serve your objective.

Now, when it comes to data science or machine learning. Businesses need the most important data, or say, curated data to build complex machine learning models. As raw and unclassified data is of no use to any business.

In this article, we will dig deeper into the meaning of data curation. And understand the “benefits of data curation tool” alongside “best data curation tools” available in the market. So that you as a data scientist or data analyst can make better or best use of data curation.

Data Curation: What Exactly is This and Who Does This?

According to Wiki, data curation is the organization and integration of data collected from several sources. Such that the value of data is maintained over time, and the same can be made available for reuse and preservation.

Now, in Machine Learning that’s a part of artificial intelligence and a subfield of Data Science, machines are taught to learn from past data. And perform a given task by using statistical methods to predict the output on their own.

So, what does a Data Curator do?

A Data Curator fills the gap between a data scientist and data analyst and as he has a better grasp of data and analytic workloads than the data engineers and as he works closely with the general management and marketing teams.

Next, if the so-called data curators have access to the data curation tools, they would not need to perform manual tasks to write ETL jobs for data insight, and when the job of data curation becomes much simpler.

The Tulane University Libraries proposes a data curation be performed along with 6-themed steps. Interestingly, those steps are instilled in the word curate itself, but with all the letters in Caps – CURATE, where —

C stands for Check Files,
U for Understanding the data and external constraints,
R for Request or locate the missing info,
A for Augmentation of metadata for findability,
T for Transform file formats for reuse, and
E for Evaluate for FAIRness.

To make it simpler

You might think of first creating raw data with attributes such as a place with its environmental condition, pollution level, population size, etc. Then, perform a search on the data sets with interesting subsets. Next, build a dataset that gives you a range of conditions for the target function, and finally, verify that the datasets are flawless, error-free, and unbiased along one or more dimensions.

Examples from both public and private sectors show us how important data curation is. An article from HBR (Harvard Business Review) talks about how the U.S. Army got benefited by making use of data curation. As another example, think of creating your own playlist and how cumbersome that gets when an online music services company promises you of providing a curated playlist. Netflix as an audio/video streaming services company is yet another example that makes use of data to personalize movies and provide curated content.

As a data curator, one of the most important tasks he performs is to ask questions when dealing with datasets and then optimize them.

Now, let’s move on to some of the biggest benefits of the data curation tool.

The Benefits of Data Curation Tool

It makes large data set easy to comprehend and gain key insights.
It allows the data to be easily searched, filtered and sorted when a query is entered.
Helps identify the most feasible or interesting datasets so as to be manipulated and customized.
It allows for seamless integration within the existing workflow.

Now, let’s have a look at some of the best data curation tools available in the market. But, before that, just know that there are many tools being made available to you considering the fact that we are in the age of Artificial Intelligence and the market gets flooded every now and then with new tools. Yet, we are making the best effort to provide you with a list that according to us has stood up to the expectations of a data scientist or analyst and those that can influence a good data modeling performance.

The Best Data Curation Tools

Informatica

An ETL tool that’s preferred over Teradata provides for data integration software and services to serve various both public and private enterprises and sectors covering telecommunication, healthcare, financial, and insurance. It uniquely stands out from other products because of the variety it offers in the form of data masking, data replica, data virtualization, data refining, and master data management.

Essential Features

A seamless platform with cloud-based, improved and highly scalable performance.
The best part – you do not need to have a prior technical knowledge to use it.
Excellent tool to be used if cross-referential data needs to be used for data workflow.

Ataccama ONE

Trusted by 350+ organizations worldwide, Ataccama ONE helps businesses transform and succeed by providing Data Governance, Data Quality, and Master Data Management – all in one place — and one that’s AI-powered for use in both hybrid and cloud environments. At best, one could think of it as an AI-driven data curation tool. That provides for reliable and collaborative data, multiple deployment options, efficient machine learning, and enterprise-driven capabilities.

Essential Features

Makes the configuration process simple and automated when it comes to metadata, project configuration, and data evaluation.
Machine learning based data curation, data cleansing, and data classification.
The best part – comes pre-configured with in-built rules for Master Data Management.
Data engineers, data scientists, DevOps engineers can have access to data integration and transformation in the most efficient form.

Aquarium

The aquarium is a platform that helps machine learning development teams improve better machine learning models. As machines will be only as good as the data they are fed with. Data curation and data management tool that it is, it helps to easily identify data labeling errors and data modeling design failures. Many different ways are available for permutation and a combination of models to arrive at the curated data. Less focus is placed on raw data use cases and more on curation and maintenance of datasets to arrive at model predictions and non-hypothetical ground truth labels.

Essential Features

Aquarium can be accessed via Cloud though on-premise deployment is currently unavailable.
Helps in dealing with wide range of use cases as it supports 3D, images, audio, and text data.
Manipulation of evaluation thresholds to obtain interactive visualization models is possible.
To build new datasets and identify relation with data subsets, users can collaborate with each other.

Clarifai

Clarifai can be said to be one-in-kind in all modeling platforms. Those are best suited for relatively inexperienced developers with machine learning use cases. It provides for an end-to-end solution for all kinds of unstructured data, when it comes to labeling, searching, refining, and modeling of data. It’s one of the first AI solutions that provides a platform for modeling text, images, and video. The best part is its recent addition of data curation features such as visual search, auto-tagging, and data annotations.

Essential features

From facial recognition to audio and image detection, Clarifai offers a broad encyclopaedia for pre-built AI models.
Users have the full liberty to customize the existing models or create new ones.

In Conclusion

Those were just a few of all the data curation tools available in the market. Out of which you can choose at your own will. There are many more that exist and aren’t any less than the ones mentioned here. To name them, they are SiaSearch, FiftyOne, Scale Nucleus, Stitch Data, Alation, Talend, Alteryx, and so on. The most important thing to know here is that in an era of Big Data and with data that’s unfiltered and fragmented available to us from innumerable sources, localization of such data becomes essentially useful and productive. By improving the quality of such data does not only help to build better business networks. But the time spent on manually detecting the business loopholes.

Even after selection of the right data curation tool, your technical issues aren’t resolved and business goals thus not achieved, you can always look forward to Oriental Solutions – a pioneer in data management – to solve all your data curation needs, given the fact that they have their own proprietary software to deal with data curation needs. Contact us at +91-95000 47196 or email us @ info@orientalsolutions.com.

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