In this post, I would like to introduce you with data.world, a place where you can discover and access data to learn from and use it to drive your visualisations. Moreover, It is quite easy to connect your data.world datasets to Tableau via a Web Data Connector (WDC) and seamlessly upload and visualise it. If you are looking to feed your hunger for data, then data.world is a very good place to check out.
What is data.world?
Data.world is a place where people around the world host their data and projects. But it is much more than just a place to dump data into. Once people upload their datasets, an inference engine is working behind the scenes to extract all the tabular data and metadata. Think of data.world as an immense database where all datasets can be joined and used assuming they have common attributes.
You can easily start a project where you can join and prepare your data in an SQL environment. It is also a great place to upload data as a free resource for others to use as well. Within the site’s interface it is also available to collaborate with others, share insights and reuse data, making it a good place to make data discovery, governance, and analysis.
Imagine a world where data discovery, access, and understanding are a shared resource for everyone.
Integration with Tableau
After setting up your account, you can easily upload data, search, view and collect other datasets. All datasets are queryable and can be linked and joined together using SQL.
Connecting with data.world web data connector is quite easy and after setting up your account, you can follow the connector’s documentation in detailed steps. The connector supports Tableau Desktop and Tableau Public versions 10 and greater.
Once you’ve set everything up you can automatically keep everything in sync and ensure your visualisations use the freshest data.
At the very last you should end up with something like that:
Now you are ready to create your first project. Open a new project and start collecting your data. When you are done with querying and your dataset is ready you can then send it directly to tableau with a single click. Within you project page, you have the ability to download as a CSV file or push the data via the Tableau WDC. Choosing to push the dataset to Tableau will prompt you with a URL to copy and paste into Tableau.
Paste you copied URL into Tableau and press enter. You will be redirected to sign in with your account credentials and then connect with you dataset.
Tableau will run the query and create an extract containing the data from your data.world project.
Happy Days! You are ready to visualise your data on Tableau.
Summary
Data world is just one place among many where we can find data. We have also made use of Tableau integrated Web Data Connector to get the data directly and start visualising.
You can check out a Covid-19 28D Tracker on Tableau Public, where I constructed a covid-19 dataset as an SQL project on data.world and then visualise it using Tableau. In order to update the dataset on a regular basis I actually used Google sheets to import the dataset and then connect it to Tableau. More about Google sheets integration can be found here.
Have Fun!
If you want to learn more about Tableau or The Information Lab, check out our blog.
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