Concepts
Discovery Space¶
The core concept in ado is called a Discovery Space. In ado you are often creating and performing operations on Discovery Spaces.
For users familiar with pandas and dataframes, a Discovery Space combines:
- the schema of a
dataframei.e. the columns and what they mean - instructions on how to fill the
dataframerows - the current data in the
dataframe(and what's missing!)
So a Discovery Space allows expressing the hidden metadata and contextual information necessary to understand and extend a dataframe. See Discovery Space for more details.
A Discovery Space is built from:
- Entities and Entity Spaces: The set of things in a Discovery Space
- Measurement Spaces: The set of experiments in a Discovery Space
- Experiments and Actuators: The available experiments and the tools that execute them
Sample Store¶
In ado data on sampled entities, and the results of experiments on them, are kept in a sample store.
A single sample store can be used by multiple Discovery Spaces, allowing them to share data. This means, for example, if an experiment has already been run, ado can reuse the existing results instead of running the experiment again, saving time and compute resources.
This ability to transparently share and reuse data is a core feature of ado. See Shared Sample Stores for more details.