Discussion on business models around Open Data is building up

May 6, 2008

This post got deleted during a blog snafu. Reposting

Many months ago, I started talking about the monetization of biological data, a theme that’s been present throughout the history of bbgm. In general, I have maintained that for the most part, the value lies not in the raw data, but in what we can do with the data. It looks like there is an interesting discussion brewing on the web around some of these ideas. Here are ~~three~~ a couple of posts, I think in chronological order

Peter Murray-Rust. The comment from Rich Apodaca is a must read. There is a follow up post from Antony Williams as well.

I will just re-iterate a generalizations, because I am only peripherally familiar with the specifics. On the web, data should be available as an addressable resource. The fact that data is available as RDF is great (and I wish more data was available as such). However, my personal preference is that data, especially open data, needs to be accompanied by APIs that allow the data to be accessed in a number of formats (not a dump per se). I think over time the acceptable formats will be established. The key aspect here are the business models. Is the business in providing a service on top of the data? For example for more than X number of API calls, there could be a fee associated.

These business models are going to be the key. Just like Open Source has found business models as have some web services, the models that allow people to build upon Open Data are the key

Image via Wikipedia

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