By Richard Pugh – Commercial Director, (UK).

As the importance of using analytics to drive decision making continues to grow at pace, so too does the need to make data science more efficient and “deployable”.  This drives many changes to the way in which analytics is performed, including:

• Allowing data scientists to collaborate on analytic projects
• Enabling discovery and re-use of code to avoid duplication of effort
• Enforcing rigour (versioning, audit) without adding admin overhead
• Centralising and standardising analytic code so it can be deployed via applications

Working with customers, and the RStudio team, Mango have been tasked with creating data science environments, leading to the development of the Data Science Workbench.

While the Data Science Workbench won’t be officially released for a few months, we couldn’t resist giving everyone a sneak peek at the way in which ModSpace (Mango’s collaborative analytics platform) and RStudio Server Professional can be integrated to create an effective R ecosystem.

ModSpace is a web based collaborative platform used by groups of analysts to store, share and discover models, data and scripts.  It manages an underlying version control repository allowing full provenance over model/script development and outputs, so you can always return to exactly what went into that analytic report you sent out a while back(!).  Working with the fantastic RStudio developers, we have integrated ModSpace directly with RStudio Server Professional, taking advantage of the authentication features of the Pro edition to enable single sign-on across both (web) applications.  That means that groups of users can collaborate on a single managed project using their favourite R IDE in an efficient manner, with the version control, audit and metadata taken care of.

This video gives a quick view of a typical workflow between ModSpace and RStudio Server Professional:

This is just one aspect of the Data Science Workbench, but something we are very proud of.  Look for the release of Data Science Workbench over the coming months.

In the meantime, if you want to get involved in the beta phase, or want more info on the other features of the Workbench, just contact [email protected].

And of course, a big thank you to the guys at RStudio for their support!