What is Palantir?
At its core, Palantir Government is an object graph or link analysis platform: raw data from existing systems is imported and transformed into a graph of objects that represent things in the real world and the relationships that connect those objects. Using a combination of human input and automated importers, the platform builds these graphs of virtual objects composed of data from sources relevant to the problem at hand. In this form, the information becomes easy for users to visually digest, inspect and reason about, but is still connected in a lossless fashion to the underlying source data.
These objects come in three major types: entities (things in the world), events (things that happen in time), and documents (containers for unstructured data). These three types represent the root of user-defined type hierarchies or ontologies as we call them. The ontology for a Palantir installation can be tailored to the specific analytic task at hand – similar to the way a database needs a schema.
Each object encapsulates all of the known data about itself in a set of properties, whose types are also defined in the type system. Links use types to represent the diff erent kinds of relationships that can exist between objects.
In addition to the object graph data platform, Palantir Government has a suite of customizable, interactive visual analysis tools. These tools enable analysts to structure, query, manipulate, analyze, and share this data using interfaces that ‘speak human.’ Compare this to traditional tools, where the analyst must learn to, ‘speak data.’
Who uses it?
We ship a cloud-in-a-box. Palantir Government runs behind the firewall: it’s purchased by an organization, installed, configured, and run on their own systems. The upshot is that we’ve built a solution for private data, ranging from medical records and financial data to other types of sensitive information. Typically, this type of data has competitive or statutory reasons to never leave its home networks and is thus neglected. Palantir liberates this data to be sliced, diced and minced to pieces.
Because of these capabilities, Palantir Government is used broadly in government and large commercial organizations. Some higher profile customers include the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the Recovery Accountability & Transparency Board (RATB). At the CDC, Palantir is used to track food-borne illness and other infectious outbreaks here and abroad. At the RATB, Palantir helps stop fraudulent grant applications to the federal government from being awarded.
Why is it special?
We manage the state of data in Palantir like a source code version control system. When an analyst logs into Palantir Government, they start work in a private sandbox that is a copy-on-write checkout of the canonical object graph in the Palantir instance. All changes are recorded against the working copy, and updates can be pushed and pulled when the analyst thinks it’s appropriate. Just like version control systems, you can rollback changes to an earlier state, create branches, and work on divergent paths of analysis.
Palantir Government is often deployed as a distributed system that crosses geographical, organizational and political boundaries. We use techniques like vector clocks and data versioning to keep remote and disconnected instances in sync, with carefully constructed UIs to handle the rare case when there’s a data conflict that can’t be automatically resolved.
We place a premium on interactivity in the tools that we build. One example is Horizon, a technology that we built to enable analysts to query and aggregate billions of objects in less than ten seconds, allowing them to quickly drill down to the subsets of objects they are actually interested in. Some other tools deliver scale, some deliver interactivity — we deliver both. Our users report that Palantir Government allows them to sift through large amounts of data and arrive at the insights they seek with an ease and power that no other suite of software tools, whether o -the-shelf products or custom-built solutions, has ever delivered.
Next Steps
- Apply: Open Positions
- Learn More: Work At Palantir – Main
