Data is now more important than ever; it impacts almost every aspect of our lives and we rely on it for everything from transport to weather forecasts. The UK economy alone is predicted to gain an additional £241 billion from data by 2020, according to GOV.UK. At this point, data really holds enough power to make or break a business.
However, the way we access and use data is changing, and it's vital for companies to understand exactly how it can affect them. Knowing the difference between big and open data is a good a place to start as any; these two terms are often confused and sometimes even used interchangeably, when in fact they're very different.
Let's take a closer look at the two and the potential impact they could have on your business.
Open data refers to any information that has been made available for anyone to access, alter, and share. It could be from a public source, e.g. government data, or from a business, e.g. company intelligence, and can be used for both commercial and non-commercial purposes.
In order for the datasets for data mining to be considered truly open, there are two specific requirements:
Technically open - The information must be presented in a clear, machine-readable format, enabling it to be easily processed by a computer application.
Legally open - The dataset must be clearly licensed as open, meaning it can be reused with no restrictions.
Open data is incredibly important and will become even more so in the not-so-distant future. This is the case for a number of reasons:
Transparency - The very nature of open data means that there is now a greater level of transparency than ever before, particularly when it comes to government information. The UK governments open data site Data.gov.uk currently has around 40,000 datasets, including everything from government spending to crime statistics, and this is being used more than ever before; in a recent survey by the Open Data Institute, 70% of respondents said they used government-provided open data.
Economical benefits - According to research from the ODI, UK open data companies (that is, those that use, produce or invest in open data), have a total turnover of around £92 billion and employ over 500,000 people. This, coupled with research from Lateral Economics which revealed that open data creates 0.5% more GDP than paid data, illustrates just how important open data is becoming to our economy.
Societal Benefits - Making data open means a wealth of opportunities for companies and organisations to create new projects and innovations to benefit society, whether it be improving public transport, providing better access to healthcare, or monitoring air and noise pollution, as in the case of startup OpenSensors.io.
So open data is information that is available to the public to use, no matter the intended purpose. Big data, on the other hand, are datasets that are on a huge scale; so much so that they cannot usually be handled by the usual software. The simplest way of thinking of it is that open data is defined by its use and big data by its size.
The image below shows the relationship between the two forms of data. Notice that the two can overlap, creating big data sources that are also open, such as the Met Office's weather and climate data. It’s also worth remembering that open data does not have to be big data to be extremely useful, for example, that provided by local government.
Big data that is also open can be especially useful to businesses, regardless of size or industry. As well as in-house data such as sales information and website traffic, there are a number of sources that can be used for a variety of business purposes. Perhaps one of the most obvious is social media; trending topics on Facebook and Twitter can offer great insight into potential opportunities to market a timely product or service; Google Trends can also work well for this. Public data sources such as weather info offered by the Met Office can be used for marketing purposes as well as sales predictions for weather-related products like sun cream etc.
One of the most powerful uses of big, open data is company intelligence. Once accessible only to those with the budget to pay for it, it's now possible for anyone to research a business for free, thanks in particular to the unprecedented amount of data opened up by Global Database.
With this open data platform, you can look at things like profit and loss accounts, balance sheets and cash flow, employee details, technology insights, group structure and more. With such a good overview of each company you can easily use the data for things like lead qualification, background checks, recruitment, or researching competitors, and with a total of four million UK companies held in the database, it's likely to hold the information you’re looking for.
There's no doubt about it; data is the future. While the amount of big data continues to grow considerably as the Internet of Things expands, it's open data that offers real power to businesses; even more so when the two are combined. By having free access to large datasets companies can gain insights that can have a great impact on their marketing, sales, and customer service strategies, as well as overall business development.
