User-driven data exploration is an activity made possible by Endeca Studio, where users find sources of data, use these sources to create an Endeca Studio application, and determine facts from the data. In this regard, Endeca Studio functions like the personal organization tools we just discussed, only for data. With Endeca Studio, using a feature known as self-service data provisioning, any data that can be put into Microsoft Excel or JSON format can be used to create an Endeca Studio application and be explored and analyzed. Users can also access JDBC-based sources or Oracle BI–sourced data.
Applications and data persist in Oracle Endeca Studio and can be reviewed at any point in the future. Moreover, once a user determines a data source is useful for fact determination, the user can share the data source (and data from other sources) with data developers to use in Endeca Integrator ETL. Many of these sources will be from the user-driven data exploration; others will be from enterprise sources and crawler-based exploration. You will explore Endeca Integrator ETL and other Endeca Integrator Acquisition System components in depth in the next chapter and extrapolate the idea of user-driven data exploration to one of enterprise data exploration. For this chapter, you will focus on user-driven data exploration and the tools within Endeca Studio that make this possible.
