Open data, what economical and social value does it generate?

Clear Byte work on making information sharing smart and at the same time create a visual understanding of content. One valuable source of data that more people should take advantage of is open data. Open data exist in different shapes and forms but are mainly provided by public sector thought open API:s and web services. In Europe there is a EU directive that recommends and guides governmental organisations to make more data available.

Open data is estimated to have great economical and social value. McKinsey Global Institute estimate that the potential value of data in seven domain areas has could be over $3 trillion only in the US. The first day that Obama took office he signed an executive order to make all governmental data open and machine-readable, i.e. open data. That has today lead to the US are amongst the top three countries in the world in providing open data.

We intend to post a number of articles that focusing on how governmental organisations that provides open data can create a greater value for third-party developers. Third-party developers are a groups of heterogeneous actors that spans from hobby programmer, small start-up companies to global enterprises. The reason that we focus on third-party developers is that this groups is the most important one to create the alleged economical and social value. Next post will address value creating mechanism that facilitates uptake and usage of open data services.