A website, then the keys
We built a site for Belmont's Cone Center and handed over the keys — because a site somebody else has to maintain for you is not really yours.
Read the dispatchData & AI, applied.
The Belmont Data & AI Collaborative is an applied lab at Belmont University. Students, developers, and staff build data pipelines, applications, and AI tools — for the university, and for nonprofit and industry partners.
01 Latest
Impact Report · Spring 2026
Twenty-one pages on the work.
What the Collaborative built this year, who we built it with, and what it added up to — read it here, or open the flipbook in its own tab.
02 What we do
An applied lab, not a research group.
We take on real problems with real data. A project usually starts with a partner who has questions and a pile of data that will not answer them yet — and ends with a pipeline, an application, or an analysis that someone else can run without us.
The work is done by students alongside staff developers. That is deliberate: the lab is how Belmont students learn to build data and AI systems that other people depend on. We build it, then we hand it over.
03 Selected work
Some of what we have shipped.
A civic data lake
We curate open federal, state, and local datasets — census, public health, environment, economy — into a queryable lake, so an analysis can start with a question instead of a month of cleanup.
See the public endpointDispatches from the build
BDAIC Commons is where we write up how something was actually built, what we learned partway through, and what we would do differently.
Read the blog04 Public tools
Things you can actually use.
The data lake, queryable by AI
Our curated open datasets are served over the Model Context Protocol, so an AI assistant can query them directly. Read-only, authenticated, and rate-limited.
https://mcp-dl.bdaic.ai/mcp
Request an access keyAI Literacy Framework
A university-wide framework giving Belmont shared language for using AI well, tiered across five levels. The platform delivers the Level 1 assessments — in pilot now with Belmont's College of Business — tracks what you have finished, and issues a certificate for each block, with every AI-assisted score reviewed by a person before it counts.
Go to the platformBDAIC Monthly
A short monthly note on what we shipped, what we are learning, and what is coming — with an archive of every past issue.
Read the latest issue05 Get involved
Work with us.
Partners
Nonprofits, agencies, and organizations — if you have data and a question it should be answering, we take on applied projects.
Students
Belmont students join the lab as developers and analysts and ship work that other people rely on. Tell us what you want to build.
Researchers
Our open data catalog is available to anyone doing public-interest work. Ask us for a key to the endpoint above.