Most organizations do not actually own their web analytics. The data sits in a vendor's system, shaped by that vendor's business model. Google and Adobe are media companies. Their analytics tools serve an advertising business, and the data you get back reflects that. If you want the full picture, you pay enterprise prices and still cannot easily get at your own numbers.
We believe there is a better posture: treat analytics as a curated source that you own and govern on purpose.
Curation means deciding in advance what deserves to be collected and what does not. AGGREGATE, the open source platform we build at Subschema, counts what happens on your websites, not who did it. No visitor IDs. No IP addresses. No exact timestamps. Small counts are withheld by the database itself, so the protection applies to every report and every query, not just the ones someone remembered to filter.
It also means the source is prepared for the people and tools that will use it. AGGREGATE publishes documented, stable views with a built-in data dictionary. Your BI tools read them. So can an AI assistant, working from the same numbers and the same definitions as everyone else. A curated source does not make anyone guess what a column means.
AGGREGATE is open source for a reason, and the reason is purpose, not price. The best platform will not come from one small team working in private. It will come from a diverse array of contributors testing it against real institutions, real constraints, and real obligations, and making it better than any one team could. That matters more in the age of AI, not less. What gets collected, and how ethically it is stewarded, shapes everything built on top of it. We would rather build that layer in the open and build it together, toward a better future for data collection, than leave it to vendors whose incentives point the other way.
There are tradeoffs, and we will state them plainly. There is no visitor journey to replay, because there are no visitor records. There is no real-time feed, because anonymous data has an honest grain. You host it yourself, so maintenance is yours. AGGREGATE is beta software and has not had an independent audit. We would rather say that up front than bury it.
Respect for your visitors and control of your own data are not in conflict. They come from the same decision: collect deliberately, protect at the source, and keep the result where it belongs, with you.
AGGREGATE is open source under AGPL-3.0. Run it, read the code, or take a starter issue and help build it.
GitHub: Subschema-LLC/aggregate
Start here: start-here issue #212
First published on the AGGREGATE by Subschema LinkedIn page: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/analytics-you-collect-should-become-curated-data-aiahc/