11–20 of 56 posts
Some people actually do build their business on this. It's not the most sustainable business model, but in today's world, good data can be - and is - a competitive advantage. In an ideal world, should it be that way? Maybe not. I think that's what this post is getting at.
Free vector map data is growing: http://openstreetmap.org . They recently got donated the whole Netherlands.
It's like freebase all right, but the article has something right about adoption. He points out some big company would have to donate a great starting dataset to drive adoption. I think this is one problem with Freebase. Another problem I see is the structuring of the data, it is a hurdle to sharing. Finally the last problem I see is Data is currently very much seen as a competitive advantage. When Google introduce f…
What I don't understand is, why don't sport leagues open source their data. What do they lose? Its a good think that people are so excited about your sport, that they build custom apps based on it. Sadly sport leagues don't seem to get it, I remember the MLB cracking down on a fan generated datatbase of baseball statistics a while ago.
Bret is spot on. Open data would unlock a vast amount of wealth. Other suggestions: A collection of various kinds of texts, translated into 20-30 different languages. 100 million words (per language) would be fine. 20 minutes of text, spoken in thousands of different voices/accents.
And I think you meant 100 thousand words per language. :-)
Isn't Metaweb's Freebase ( http://www.freebase.com/ ) doing this? Check it out if you have not seen this before, these guys are Rockstars!!
Two years ago I wrote http://formula1db.com , to teach myself sql. To get the data, I had to screen scrape formula1.com . Once I had the data, learning SQL became a joy. I haven't done much with the data since I built the site, but I am considering open sourcing it. What I don't understand is, why don't sport leagues open source their data. What do they lose? Its a good think that people are so excited about your spo…
They think that a popular application using "their data" is necessarily lucrative and they think that they should get a huge hunk of that money.