December, 2025
Dear clients, partners, and friends,
As we reach the end of 2025, our fourth year of operations, it is once again time to reflect on our achievements and learning over the past year, and to give you our perspective on the year to come.
First, we must welcome a new member of our team, Kevin Shank joins us this year and has brought us additional capability in the AI and Data Governance competencies amongst others. Kevin has deep expertise in several highly relevant areas and we are grateful to have him join us.
2025 was a year of high activity inside the industry, PDR, and within the Egeria open-source project, providing us all with a lot to focus on in 2026. The direction we chose to follow when we started the company has demonstrated its potential to deliver significant business value for you, our clients, and partners.
In our original end of year letter in 2022 we reflected on how establishing control over, and value from, the ever-increasing volumes of data that all companies are receiving was (and remains) a significant need in many companies. Now with the advent of AI and the deployment of AI models across almost every aspect of many industries, that need is even greater. Along with our partners, our ability to provide deep experience in this area to help your teams to be successful in their efforts in this space, and to help avoid the many pitfalls that exist have resonated with many of you. AI with its many issues and untrustworthy outputs have led us into some deep thinking and research around how to supplement, what is being called, Context Engineering, to have measurable improvements. As always, we certainly appreciate receiving your insights on these issues. Look out for a series of blogs from us exploring these and related topics.
Over the past year we have contributed most of our time to enhancing and extending the Egeria open-source platform to better support user access both programmatically and through some new UIs we have delivered and continue to build. Mandy has spent a significant amount of effort refactoring several areas in the back-end servers and slimming down the installation. We have added a significant Python interface layer to the system, as well as capabilities for both Data Scientists and Business users to access the system without having to code to the Rest APIs.
As always, your insights and viewpoints are valuable to us as we work to evolve these assets in the real world and of course leverage the assets our partners bring to the table. This includes:
- Pyegeria, a python interface layer to a greatly extended set of Egeria View Services, we have so far created a total of 41, one more and we will have the answer to life, the universe and everything!
- Dr_Egeria, a set of Markdown Capabilities to author and report on Egeria information using simple text. Dr. Egeria commands can be interspersed with other text in markdown documents.
- Hey_Egeria, a set of UIs to allow administrative and other users to query status and content in the Egeria servers.
- My_Egeria, a terminal UI to allow users to query into the system and over time to run processes against the returned data.
- Most recently we have implemented support for AI agent and model integration by adding MCP protocol support, we are currently using this in our research and development activities. Supporting successful AI application deployments is one of our primary goals for 2026. To see a recent blog post on this topic: Context Intelligence.
As you can see, we continue in our commitment to open-source software, and particularly, our ongoing contributions and leadership to the Linux Data and AI Foundation’s Egeria project led by Mandy. Key initiatives we will focus on include:
- Stewardship and Incident Management – Automation can improve repeatability and remove tedium – but collaborations between people supported by automation are critical to successful governance.
- Metadata Observability – Egeria supports a vast variety and volume of metadata from across a range of integrations – providing easier observation and reporting over this ecosystem can help governance programs communicate with stakeholders as well as enable innovative new use cases that provide even greater business value.
- Support for AI enablement particularly in terms of improving data quality, context and governance as it relates to AI. Placing Egeria into the various AI processes will be a major focus area for us in 2026.
As we move forward in 2026, we will continue with these and other community developments and will look to achieve a sustainable balance between our proprietary asset development, open-source contributions, commercial engagements and our online presence particularly in the blog space.
We look forward to working with you all in pursuit of these objectives, your success in these projects is our success, and our goal is always to leave you in a better position to be both successful and self-reliant allowing you to deliver quantifiable business value from all your projects.
Our thanks for your support and encouragement in 2025 and our best wishes for you and yours over the holidays and through 2026.
Pragmatic Data Research Ltd
Mandy Chessell, Peter Coldicott, Kevin Shank, Dan Wolfson