Data for AI: Open vs Locked In
Open table formats won the storage war. Then agents showed up, and every platform decided it wants to be the one place they live. The walled garden is back, and this time it is being built around the catalog, the semantic layer, and the agent runtime instead of the file format.
That's the theme for our next Data for AI meetup: Open vs Locked In. Open table formats, open semantics, and open catalogs versus the walled garden, in the age of agents. We'll get into what "open" actually buys you when the user of your data is an agent, where interoperability holds up in production and where it quietly doesn't, and the cases where locking in was the right call.
Call for speakers (open through October 23)
We're looking for practitioner talks, either 20-minute full talks or 5 to 10 minute lightning talks:
Open table formats (Iceberg, Delta, Hudi) running across more than one engine or cloud, and what actually broke
Open semantics, ontologies, and standards like OSI that work across tools, not just inside one platform's UI
Catalog federation, the Iceberg REST spec, and what interoperability looks like in production
Agents that work across the stack vs agents that only work inside one vendor's garden
The case for locking in: when the walled garden won, and why
War stories, benchmarks, and "here's what we got wrong" talks are especially welcome. Submit by 11:59 PM PT on Friday, October 23: Open Google Form
The format
Practitioner talks, Q&A, and the hallway track, with food and drinks on us. The lineup drops once the CFP closes.
Built for data engineers, AI/ML engineers, platform architects, and the leaders they build for. Seats are capped, so grab your spot now.
Getting there
OneSpace, 2665 North 1st St, San Jose, CA 95134. Suite 214 is on the 2nd floor; follow the directory on the wall.
Keep the conversation going
The best threads from these meetups don't end at the venue. Join the community on Discord to swap notes with speakers and other builders between events.
Want to help us run the event?
Data for AI is community-run, and a couple of extra hands make every meetup better. If you can help with check-in, setup, AV, or photos and video on the night, we'd love to have you: Open Google Form
Sponsors
This event is made possible by our sponsors, who keep the Data for AI community running.
Datastrato is the original creator of Apache Gravitino, the open-source metadata lake that puts tables, models, and files under a single catalog, lineage graph, and access layer. They are building the open data fabric platform to accelerate trusted AI, and host the Data for AI community. More at datastrato.ai.
Neo4j is the graph database behind many of the world's knowledge graphs. Its native property-graph engine and Cypher query language make relationships a first-class citizen, which is why teams reach for it on connected-data problems and, increasingly, GraphRAG for grounding LLMs. More at neo4j.com.
Want to reach the Data for AI community with your brand? E-mail adi@datastrato.ai.