by Angela Guess
Edd Dumbill recently analysed the data market offerings of four top providers. He begins, “The web has facilitated a blossoming of information providers. As the ability to discover and exchange data improves, the need to rely on aggregators such as Bloomberg or Thomson Reuters is declining. This is a good thing: the business models of large aggregators do not readily scale to web startups, or casual use of data in analytics. Instead, data is increasingly offered through online marketplaces: platforms that host data from publishers and offer it to consumers. This article provides an overview of the most mature data markets, and contrasts their different approaches and facilities.”
Dumbill begins with a look at Infochimps: “According to founder Flip Kromer, Infochimps was created to give data life in the same way that code hosting projects such as SourceForge or GitHub give life to code. You can improve code and share it: Kromer wanted the same for data. The driving goal behind Infochimps is to connect every public and commercially available database in the world to a common platform. Infochimps realized that there’s an important network effect of ‘data with the data,’ that the best way to build a data commons and a data marketplace is to put them together in the same place. The proximity of other data makes all the data more valuable, because of the ease with which it can be found and combined.”
photo credit: Infochimps
