As far as buzzwords go, Big Data is out and open data is in. Or at least thats what a glance at the headline seems to say. Across the country, states and cities are opening up their data streams to the public. The mayor of Chattanooga, TN, for instance, recently ordered the citys government data be open for public use. Los Angeles did the same thing. In both cases, the cities are opening up previously hard-to-access information, from 911 response times, to the number of bike lanes, to the types of permits issued. Alongside these local efforts, the federal governments Data.gov project – launched in 2009 – is finally emerging as a real resource. It now boasts over 105,000 data sets from over 227 federal agencies.
All of which is helping to create a new market that traffics in these new sources of open data. Take CivicData, for example. The site is run by Accela, an enterprise software provider for government agencies, and aims to help such agencies more easily disseminate data sets. It also provides an entry point for citizens or private developers looking to dive into public zoning, infrastructure, or transport data, just to name a few possibilities. The dashboard and visualization tools enable easy data exploration, potentially removing the need for IT involvement on simple analytics projects.
Private companies, for their part, seem more than willing to use public data to drive their business decisions. The Open Data 500 tracks what private companies are using which federal data. It details a plethora of healthcare, energy, and housing companies that harness open data sets from federal agencies to improve their own operations. Some of the most popular data comes from agencies such as the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Department of Commerce.
Startup Enigma meanwhile hopes to help private citizens and companies find public data that, while technically open, might not be easy to access. They bill themselves as the Google of public data. Their database contains not only formal data sets, but also findings from published reports, and under-the-radar information such as daily weather reports, property tax assessments, and liquor licenses.
Exactly what companies are using this data for isnt entirely clear yet. However, its easy to imagine companies using it to better target potential customers, or for improving the algorithms used to select new business locations. Its also unclear exactly how comfortable citizens will be with their local governments making such data entirely available, for free. Much of the information being released online has always been public, albeit in more limited forms (checking permits or city records might have entailed a visit to an archive building). For people who know where to look, that information is now just a few clicks away.
As more cities publish local government data online, its likely to give rise to both state-level analytics services, and hyper-focused startups. Forward thinking business intelligence software companies may introduce plug-ins designed to pull data directly from sites such as Enigma and CivicData. The possibilities of such a connected network are nearly endless.
