The world runs on data. From social media to shopping online to healthcare to financial planning, data drives our interactions in the world. Access to greater amounts of data can create a flywheel of value creation; better data leads to better insights which leads to greater profits. 
Ocean Protocol was built to democratize the free flow of data. It repurposes the standards created within crypto and DeFi to facilitate a new paradigm of _self-custodial_ ownership and access control of our data assets. NFTs become a permissionless standard of ownership, ERC20s act as a permissionless standard for flexible access control rights, crypto wallets like metamask become a self-custodial holder of our assets. 
Ocean's [Compute-to-Data](../developers/compute-to-data/) engine resolves the trade-off between the benefits of open data and data privacy risks. Using the engine, algorithms can be run on data without exposing the underlying data. Now, data can be widely shared to contribute to the worlds shared knowledge while also respecting individuals right to privacy.
Data scientists that prefer to use python can work with Ocean by using [Ocean.py](../developers/ocean.py/). Ocean.py is a python library that interacts with all Ocean contracts and tools. To get started with the library, check out our guides. They will teach installation and set-up and several popular workflows such as[ publishing an asset](../developers/ocean.py/publish-flow.md) and starting a [compute job](../developers/ocean.py/compute-flow.md).
