news.ycombinator.com• Feb 24, 2020• 1 min read
Launch HN: Syndetic (YC W20) – Software for explaining datasetsHi HN,We're Allison and Steve of Syndetic (https://www.getsyndetic.com). Syndetic is a web app that data providers use to explain their datasets to their customers. Think ReadMe but for datasets instead of APIs.Every exchange of data ultimately comes down to a person at one company explaining their data to a person at another. Data buyers need to understand what's in the dataset (what are the fields and what do they mean) as well as how valuable it can be to them (how complete is it? how relevant?). Data providers solve this problem today with a "data dictionary" which is a meta spreadsheet explaining a dataset. This gets shared alongside some sample data over email. These artifacts are constantly getting stale as the underlying data changes.Syndetic replaces this with software connected directly to the data that's being exchanged. We scan the data and automatically summarize it through statistics (e.g., cardinality), coverage rates, frequency counts, and sample sets. We do this contin
