Even businesses have an interest in opening up their data From +David Weinberger, "A Limit to Business...

Even businesses have an interest in opening up their dataFrom +David Weinberger, "A Limit to Business Intelligence," KMWorld, July 5, 2013http://www.kmworld.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=90485"It's great that a 'data native' [in business] now has the skills and tools to take control of the analytics process. But the real power comes when research and researchers are able to use one another's work, and to elaborate on that work in public. That's how you get a data commons that not only aggregates data but that enables researchers to bang their models together to discover weaknesses and to create sparks. We see this sort of commons arising in some of the sciences. The Human Genome project, for example, made lots of data public, which enabled and encouraged dramatic advances in genetics and related sciences. Lots of environmental data is public. Physicists, among others, are rapidly developing a culture of openness. Networking knowledge is the only way to enable it to scale to the size of the Internet. But it's different in business....Business views its data as a valuable asset, a conception that knowledge management has all too often abetted. Business thus is not going to share its data with the world, because the world contains the business' competitors. But, if networking knowledge is how we get really smart, then businesses are structurally unable to get as smart as they could be. Which seems a shame....The extent to which businesses protect their data assets is the extent to which business is limiting its own intelligence. The trade-off may be worth it. But we should at least recognize that it's a trade-off." #oa #openaccess #opendata  

A limit to business intelligence?