Data Curation & Readiness · Graz, Austria
Compliant · Interoperable · Usable
What I do
Discovery & Assessment
Locating and inventorying the data an organization actually has — including the shadow spreadsheets and half-documented exports — and testing whether it can really answer the question at hand.
Curation & Documentation
Structuring and describing data, and embedding provenance and data dictionaries, so it can be found, trusted, and reused — by a repository, a report, or someone who wasn't there when it was collected.
Governance & Compliance
Meeting FAIR principles, GDPR, and funder or grantor mandates without losing sight of the people who actually have to use the data day to day.
Activation
Turning curated data into a decision, a deposited dataset, or a working AI/RAG system. AI is one destination for well-curated data — not the starting point.
About
Most data work centers on whoever receives the data: a repository enforcing a mandate, a funder collecting a report, a system consuming it downstream. Almost nobody helps the person who actually has to produce, curate, and hand it over do that well, and get something useful back for their own purposes in the process. DatenValue is an independent data curation and readiness practice built for that gap, helping organizations get their data into a state where whoever needs it next can actually use it.
With over 20 years of experience curating data for the people and systems that depend on it, I work with research groups, mission-driven organizations, and teams building AI systems — wherever data quality, provenance, and usability aren't optional extras.
I'm Unmil Karadkar. Behind DatenValue is more than two decades of research into how people and institutions actually use data — moving between computer science, information science, and the humanities, and applying methods from all three to enhance data utility across fields as different as neurology, space sustainability, and the digital humanities. Before founding DatenValue, I held faculty positions at the University of Texas at Austin's School of Information (2009–2019) and the University of Graz's Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Aging and Care (2021–2025), and have published more than 50 peer-reviewed articles, chapters, and conference papers — most recently a 2026 special issue of the Journal of Global Ageing on digital surveillance in later life.
Core disciplines
Who this helps
Based in
Graz, Austria
Available globally · Remote-first
Contact
Engagements begin with a scoping call to understand your data landscape, system goals, and governance requirements. Typical projects run 2–24 months.
unmil@datenvalue.comResponse within one business day · opens your email client with a starting template