What do businesses really look for in open data? - Data Matters

"In 2015, the UK's primary open data portal, www.data.gov.uk, will be six years old. The portal hosts approximately 20,000 official data sets from central government departments and their agencies, local authorities and other public sector bodies across the country. Just over half of these data sets are available as open data under the Open Government Licence (OGL). Data.gov.uk forms part of an international network of over three hundred open data efforts that have seen not just thousands but millions of data sets worldwide becoming freely available for personal or commercial use. [See http://datacatalogs.org and www.quandle.com]. Reading the latest studies that highlight the global economic potential of open data, such as that sponsored by the Omidyar Network, you get a sense that a critical mass has finally been achieved and the use of open data is set for explosive growth ... simply publishing open data does not guarantee that a business will use it. This is particularly true in large organisations that struggle to maximise use of their own data, let alone be aware of the Government's broader open data agenda. The Government's efforts to stimulate greater business use of open data can actually be damaged by a well-intentioned but poorly targeted approach to opening up public sector information - an approach that may also leave more difficult-to-publish but still commercially and economically important data sets closed.  But is business use predicated on whether these data sets are open or not? And what is the impact on economic success? Businesses would obviously prefer external data to be published under a genuinely open licence, such as the OGL.  The data is free for commercial use with no restrictions other than the requirement to share alike or to attribute the data to the publisher. However, if businesses are building new products or services, or relying on the data to inform their strategy, a number of characteristics other than just openness become critical in determining success ..."