Google Data Commons on Spanner Graph Reaches General Availability, Platform Previewed

Unifying Public and Private Data

Google has made Data Commons on Spanner Graph generally available and introduced a preview of the new Data Commons Platform. These offerings aim to simplify the process of connecting internal business data with external public reference data, enabling organizations to build comprehensive knowledge graphs.

Data Commons Overview

The Data Commons project aggregates public datasets from over 100 authoritative sources, including the United Nations, World Bank, and US Census Bureau. It contains over 400 billion data points structured using standardized Schema.org definitions. Data Commons provides tools and cloud-based APIs for accessing and integrating these cleaned datasets across various domains like agriculture, demographics, and health.

Transition to Spanner Graph

Initially, Data Commons used Bigtable as a caching layer for large-scale lookups. The architecture has now transitioned to a native graph model with Spanner Graph. This change provides a SQL-like interface, graph expressiveness, high availability, horizontal scale-out, multi-region transactional consistency, and native ISO/IEC 39075 Graph Query Language (GQL) support.

Impact on Data Integration

The integration of Data Commons with Spanner Graph and the new platform streamlines the process of combining private and public data. This allows for advanced analytical use cases, such as analyzing national GDP trends, mapping regional pollution levels, or tracking health equity, using preprocessed and normalized data.