You will start by importing the data you need for future analysis.

The `fetch_openml` function (from the `sklearn.datasets` module, which is part of the popular `scikit-learn` library for machine learning in Python) is used to download and load available datasets in the OpenML repository. In this case, it is used to download the MNIST dataset, which is a well-known dataset of handwritten digits that is often used for image classification tasks.

In this project, we are going to focus on recognizing handwritten digits using machine learning algorithms.