Open Data Offers Huge Opportunity for Entrepreneurs - SiliconHills

"Entrepreneurs are going to be the ones who shape the data revolution, but they’re going to face some weighty opposition from the legacy data holders. That was the conclusion of a lively, rapid-fire panel Tuesday morning at SXSW Interactive called 'How to Capitalize on Open Data.' The panel, assembled by Susan Strausberg, founder of 9W Search and previous founder of Edgar Online, included Aman Bhandari, global director of strategic alliances at Merck and a senior advisor to the U.S. Chief Technology Officer at the White House; data journalist Ashish Patel, founder of The DocGraph Journal; and moderated by Michael Atkin, managing director of the Enterprise Data Management Council. Atkin started the conversation with a brief history of data, beginning with data tagging and keyword searching which 'unshackled' data from previous formats such as spreadsheets. 'This precisely defined the meaning of data as separate knowledge from format, from content.' The next big breakthrough was OWL, the Web Ontology Language, which helped people understand the relations between data. And now the data world is developing toward transparency, collaboration, paying for volume and paying for value. Consumer demand of data. Atkin said venture funding in data was close to $2 billion. The trend is away from legacy systems—governments and industries like healthcare hoarding the data—and toward transparency. This provides a huge opportunity for entrepreneurs to capitalize on data analysis products. But, as Strausberg pointed out, there are a lot of mistakes waiting in the opportunity in terms of making sure the data is accurate. So the question, Atkin said, is 'How do we deal with intersection of opportunity and chaos? .."