The value of open corporate data, case examples in IODC16

The openness of public sector information is already a reality, although more international efforts are still needed to bring this movement to all corners of the planet, as it is drawn from the conclusions of the last Open Data Barometer. However, the values of open philosophy have not been taken on board in the private sphere, though it is increasingly common to find cases of openness of corporate data.

In this context, the International Open Data Conference organized a special session, moderated by Amparo Ballivian from World Bank, to give voice to those companies that have opted for open data, which had the opportunity to share with the open data community their international projects on openness and reuse of data.

The first speaker was Richard Benjamins, director of big data and business intelligence at Telefónica. Nowadays, this telecom company has a platform which regularly publishes information related to consumption, business results, reports, etc. as open data. Parallel to this portal, Telefónica also opens up its data for specific cases such as hackathons which are periodically organized in collaboration with other entities, in order to promote the reuse and development of innovative solutions based on Telefonica’s data. So, as a result of these initiatives, it has been possible to launch applications that reduce the time an ambulance arrives at the scene of an accident or create a map with the best locations for fire stations in cities.

The company is aware that the open data offer many advantages for the business sector: from enriching the corporate information itself, improving products and services, promoting the open innovation to participating in social projects with a real impact on society. For these reasons, Telefónica is working on a forthcoming open data portal that users can access and reuse its information.

In addition, Benjamins wanted to share those company fears and risks related to openness of information -losing the control of data, security issues, privacy, legal barriers and techniques-, but he also highlighted the role of open data as a business asset which if it is properly exploited, it offers a great business profitability.

With a completely different approach, Jed Sundwall from Amazon Web Services explained the Landsat project, a set of satellites placed into orbit by the US providing spatial and environmental data for their reuse. One of the major barriers in accessing this type of information is its variety and its storage in different sources, many of them still hidden. In fact, in the words of Sundwall, 80% of the time is spent in getting and preparing the data.

To overcome these barriers, cloud services like Amazon Web Services can help access quickly and easily open data, as in the case of the partnership of the company with the American agency NOAA, specialized in environmental research, which used the Amazon platform to improve the availability of data from their radars and thereby increasing its accessibility.

This panel also included the Spanish company Informa whose business model is based on the collection of public and private information to offer it to customers in the B2B area (Business to Business). Carlos Fdez Iñiigo, on behalf of the organization, highlighted the national progress on public information citing the publication of the BOE in structured web format which has led to the reduction of 80% of the company workload.

The expert also highlighted the importance of open standards when reusing the private sector data. For example, thanks to the standards of financial data, almost 80% of Spanish companies publish their annual information following the same format which has meant huge savings in time and costs.
Fdez Inigo took this opportunity to explain to national open data policy makers some possible improvements in the open data system as a greater granularity of data, best processing tools, formats more coherent and finally, a major update of public sector information.

Richard Stirling, from the Open Data Institute, was in charge of closing this session as manager of the business incubator of this entity, which is working, since 2013, in the creation of a global network of start-ups focussed on the innovation with open data. Currently, apart from an incubator in the UK, ODI is collaborating with the ODINE project at European level, with the government of Mexico in the Labora initiative and, more recently, it has opened an accelerator for startups in Malaysia.

The focus of these start-ups is veering towards a social perspective, reusing the open data to solve problems of citizens, empowering them through the data. Stirling shared with attendees some of the projects as Yana, a start-up Mexican that seeks to improve the quality of life of people with mental health problems in Mexico City or Demand logic, a more traditional data enterprise that helps homeowners with the efficient management of their homes. Two examples of how open data are also a raw material for cultural and social change.

Thanks to international forums such as the IODC is possible to put together initiatives from different parts of the world, know the barriers that private companies face when they release their data or reuse public sector information, and of course give visibility to projects that are already working with open data and positively impacting their environment.

Then, a graph with the comments of the speakers of the panel related to the question made by the moderator "What would happen to businesses if public open data disappear?" in the discussion after the session: