YYC DataCon Workshop - Context Engineering, Hands On

Sign up for this insightful hands-on workshop taking place during the 2026 YYC DataCon.

YYC DataCon ticket required: A valid 2026 YYC DataCon ticket is required to attend this workshop. You can purchase your ticket here: https://www.showpass.com/yycdatacon2026/. Please check the official YYC DataCon schedule for the final workshop time, room, and event details.

Time: To be announced
Duration: 2 hours. Part 1 before lunch and Part 2 after lunch! 
Location: BMO Centre — room to be announced
Skill level: Beginner-friendly; basic familiarity with data analytics or SQL is helpful but not required.
Required: Bring your own laptop so you can follow along!

Setup instructions will be sent to registered attendees ahead of the workshop. Please make sure you have permission to install any required software on your laptop.

Workshop description

Point an AI agent at a raw warehouse and it will guess — at joins, at definitions, at what your metrics mean — and hand you a confident wrong answer. The fix isn't a smarter agent. It's making the definitions unavoidable — every query goes through a layer that defines them.

Hands-on with Malloy, the open-source semantic modeling language: what a semantic layer is, why it's the right form of context for analytics, and how to build one.

What we'll cover

• Semantic layers: what they are, and why they're the substrate AI analytics needs
• Malloy: the language, and what changes when meaning lives in the model rather than in queries
• The open-source agent tooling: Malloy Publisher's MCP tools and skills that enable modeling and analysis workflows
• Building a semantic model to capture business meaning
• Analyzing data to find trustworthy answers to any question
• Building data apps on a governed model

Bring a laptop and, if you have one, some data you'd like to explore. We'll send setup instructions ahead of time so you can hit the ground running, but showing up cold and using sample data is completely fine!

If you bring your own data, please make sure it does not contain confidential, sensitive, or proprietary information that you are not authorized to use during the workshop.

Open source throughout. Come with questions; we'd rather go deep on your data problems than march through slides.

Who should attend: Data analysts, analytics engineers, data engineers, BI developers, data scientists, and anyone interested in building more trustworthy AI-powered analytics.

Please note: This workshop is part of the 2026 YYC DataCon program. A YYC DataCon ticket (purchase here: https://www.showpass.com/yycdatacon2026/) is required for entry, and attendees should refer to the official conference schedule for the confirmed time, room, and any final workshop updates.