Machine learning groups form Consortium for Python Data API Standards to reduce fragmentation

Deep learning framework Apache MXNet and Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX) today launched the Consortium for Python Data API Standards to improve interoperability for machine learning practitioners and data scientists using any framework, library, or tool from the Python ecosystem. ONNX itself was formed by Facebook and Microsoft in 2017 to encourage interoperability between frameworks and tools. Today, ONNX includes nearly 40 organizations with influence in AI and data science, including AWS, Baidu, and IBM, along with hardware makers like Arm, Intel, and Qualcomm. The new consortium, which will develop standards for dataframes and arrays or tensors, hopes to address the fragmentation that has affected the data ecosystem in recent years. The Python programming language is used for Python dataframes like Pandas, PySpark, and Apache Arrow.