dat

dat (GitHub: maxogden/dat, License: BSD 4-Clause) is a project that seeks providing better tools for data collaboration.

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npm install dat

What is dat?

I like the name, makes for clever titles like this 🙂 Anyways, dat:

  • make data syncable. automatic sync and updates of entire data sets (or subsets)
  • data sets can be very large (billions of items) or updated frequently (real time data)
  • sync and transformation plugin API to connect dat to any existing database/format/language
  • built with automated + decentralized workflows in mind

To illustrate the goals of dat consider the GitHub project, which is a great model of this idea working in a different space. GitHub is built on top of an open source tool called git and provides a user-friendly web application that lets software developers find code written by others, use it in their own programs and improve upon it. In a similar fashion dat will be developed as a set of tools to store, synchronize, manipulate and collaborate in a decentralized fashion on sets of data, hopefully enabling platforms analogous to GitHub to be built on top of it.

The concept sounds pretty amazing to me. Currently dat is in pre-alpha stage but with full time support from Max Ogden it will evolve very quickly.

Aside from a truly epic beard, Max also has a cool talk on YouTube introducing dat. Have you gotten any ideas on how this could be used yet?