Inform and enhance your business with open data

Data is your organisation’s most valuable resource – and that includes data you don’t own. That might sound nonsensical, but the fact is that all the information generated or acquired by your company only represents a tiny fraction of what’s available to you. There’s a vast wealth of open data out there, waiting to be exploited and turned in to actionable insights.

What is open data?

Broadly speaking, open data is any information resource that’s freely accessible and legally available for third-party use. In practice, the term is normally used to refer specifically to online datasets that anyone can download and process.

“Legally available” doesn’t necessarily mean you can treat the data as your own. There might be restrictions on what you can do with the information you download, such as a requirement to attach a credit to any derived work. Perhaps the best-known open licences are the Creative Commons licences, of which there are six (see overleaf), but these are far from the only possibilities – the data owner is free to attach any sort of stipulation they like to the resource they’re offering, so it’s important to take