Concept

What Queria solves and what it values

Queria is a service that publishes data as a database, not as files or an API. The goal is to turn “open data that happens to be published” into “open data you can actually use”. This page introduces the problems Queria is trying to solve and the thinking at the root of its design.

The problem

Open data arrives in inconsistent shapes. Character encodings, column names, and units are not standardized, so before you can use anything you first lose time to preprocessing. Worse, the same preprocessing gets rewritten over and over by people all around the world, each on their own machine. An API does not change this: you still have to pull the data out before you can aggregate it, so it carries the same problem as a file.

That “download, then preprocess” step is exactly what keeps people away from data that should be easy to touch. Queria takes on all of that preparation, attaches meaning to the cleaned data, and puts it in one place where everyone can access it in the same form.

Publishers have their own difficulties. Converting to a standard format tends to be manual work, and every update needs a human to check it. On top of that, nobody can see whether the result is being used at all, so the effort piles up with no case for improving anything. Hard to use, therefore unused; unused, therefore never improved. Breaking that loop is what Queria is for.

Three things we care about

Ready to use, no preprocessing

Queria’s data comes with the groundwork already done: unified formats, tidied column names and units, and missing or inconsistent values absorbed. Metadata describing what each table and column means is bundled in, so you can start using it right away — no downloads, no reshaping. There is no login and no environment setup; open a browser and you can write SQL immediately.

Clean data with metadata is not only a starting point for human analysis — it also directly improves the accuracy of answers when you hand the data to an AI.

AI answers a human can verify

Queria makes all data access happen through SQL. When you delegate an analysis to an AI, you can read the WHERE clauses, JOINs, and aggregation logic as-is and judge with your own eyes whether the answer holds up. Unlike an API that returns only results, we value keeping the reasoning traceable.

Use the tools you like

Queria publishes its data as a database rather than as files — specifically, a DuckLake catalog — so any environment that can connect to DuckDB can reference the same data directly. Browser, Python, BI tools — the choice of instrument is yours.

If you publish data

Queria is a service for the people who publish data — mostly local governments — as much as for the people who use it.

Publishing as a database means nobody has to load or convert anything at their end. We can measure how much the data is used and report it back, so you can judge what publishing is worth. And your data sits alongside data from other publishers, with municipality codes and coordinates lined up, so uses emerge that would never have come from one organization’s data on its own.

See About Queria for more.

Next steps

• Introduction: get hands-on and try it out
• Pricing: what it costs to use
• How it works: the technology behind data running in your browser
• About Queria: project background and goals