What is Open Data?

Open Data is data that is freely available for anyone to download, use, modify, and redistribute without any legal or financial restrictions. Government organizations, academic institutions, and non-profits are the main sources of world’s open data, although individuals and companies often also contribute. Open Data can help accelerate research, drive new technologies, improve efficiencies, and provide new opportunities for collaboration between organizations. 

Problem

On its path Open Data encounters significant amount of issues that prevent it from reaching its true potential:

  • For the vast majority of organizations that possess the world’s most valuable data, publishing data is not part of their core business – they often lack incentives, expertise, and funding to be good data publishers.
  • Most of the data never sees the light of day and remains locked in organizational silos.
  • Data that does get published is often very hard to discover, uses poor non-machine-readable formats, does not preserve history, and requires a lot of cleaning before it can be used.
  • As the result – the astonishing 80% of time of data scientists is spent on data search and preparation
  • Lack of standards and interoperability between data sources means that every publisher is unique, has different APIs, governance, and access policies – further adding to the time it takes to get data
  • The results of this long process are not reusable – whenever data is copied it becomes disjoint from its original source and non-trustworthy, meaning that every data science project has to start from scratch, from raw and dirty data. It’s a vicious cycle.
  • This entire process adds a significant amount of latency. By the time most data projects finish – their results are already many months out-of-date.

These issues hinder any collaboration efforts around Open Data, making it impossible to build efficient and sustainable workflows that allow rapid decision making.

Mission

At ODDS, our mission is to:

  • Make data publishing easy and affordable to even smallest organizations
    • Minimal infrastructure
    • Publishers retain full ownership and control over their data
    • Best data publishing practices out-of-the-box
    • Interoperable solution usable by all sectors of the economy
  • Standardize data access
    • Datasets easily discoverable
    • Decentralized and federated storage and compute
    • Real-time data
    • Unified privacy framework
  • Enable reuse and collaboration on Open Data
    • Ensure data is verifiably trustworthy no matter how many hands or processing steps it went through
    • Bring time spent by researchers on data prep from weeks to minutes
    • Let people build autonomous data processing pipelines
    • Make collaboration on data as easy as on Open Source Software
  • Make real-time, high-quality, actionable data instantly available for decision makers, automation, and AI/ML.

Learn more about our solutions and join us in our goal to build trustworthy and efficient collaborations around Open Data for global impact!