Businesses Cash In on Open Government Data
In today’s age of digital information processing, data is critical to any business. One may have the best of systems in place, but without robust data to process, the system by itself does not hold much value.
Access to data is becoming increasingly obtainable through several open data projects that are now available globally, often sponsored by governmental bodies. A housing hackathon this past weekend provided private homebuyer data as well as public data from the US Housing & Urban Development Department to encourage more than four hundred developers to build a housing solution that will help low-income groups and first-time homebuyers.
Zillow showcased how its entire business is made possible because of such open data—this is the base on which its popular Zestimate algorithm was written years ago—and other companies, including Redfin, Trulia, and Realtor.com, also have been leveraging federal housing data. President Barack Obama has been explicitly supporting making government data resources publicly available to help start new businesses and drive the economy.
In addition to the US, the UK is another leader in the space of open government data, and developing countries such as India also are working toward greater digitization and implementing government data projects. Traditionally, open data projects have been more popular in sectors such as education, transportation, electricity, energy, health care, consumer products, and consumer finance, and these industries are just starting to leverage federal information and cash in on this huge potential.
An open data project definitely helps multiple entities. Besides the businesses that rely on such data, the general public that now has access to this information benefits from more transparency into overall executive operations. It also provides more accountability for government bodies, better justifying its operations.
The question becomes how to define the core attributes of an administration’s open data project. In 2007 a group of advocates for open government created eight principles to regulate public government data, focusing on areas such as completeness, timeliness, accessibility, and machine processability.
Accuracy is also important; without accuracy, the relevance and use of such open data is lost. This is certainly a downside to open government data: Ensuring the accuracy of the high volumes of information being made available takes a significant amount of time and money. Curation and data cleansing solutions do exist, but they become an intermediary layer between the government and the end-user, which is not always the ideal scenario.
While such open projects are a globally welcomed move to encourage transparency and support the economy, these efforts still have a long way to go in establishing themselves as foolproof data sets that can be leveraged by everyone. But private-sector businesses taking advantage of these public offerings is the first step in making this data smarter, more innovative, and more lucrative.
