The changing economics of data publishing and sharing

Silicon Valley and other hot spots of innovation have produced a number of disruptive technologies over the years. They provide important reference points for long-standing, traditional industries yet to experience the quantum shift in effectiveness that comes from disruption.

Cloud technology naturally lends itself to solving the problem of connectivity. And there are plenty of industries that have been transformed through greater connectivity – from consumer plays like Google, Facebook, Airbnb, eBay and most recently Uber, as well as business platforms like Xero for small business and LinkedIn for recruiting.

Examples of cloud disruption vary, but when it comes to the concept of connectivity, the approach and fundamentals are mostly uniform. An oversimplified way to sum it up would be:

Using the collaborative nature of cloud technology to bring otherwise disconnected or fragmented markets together around a real-world common purpose.

Data relating to earth, whether it’s geospatial by nature or can be ‘spatialised’ has been a slow sector to move on the cloud front, as elegantly handling large, complex geospatial datasets online is a difficult problem to solve. But the wheels of innovation are moving quickly, with broadband speeds, browser technology and cloud hosting services coming together to create an opportunity to redefine how data flows.

Looking at the current market, on the one hand there are a good selection of powerful applications for authoring and editing datasets, and others that put these datasets to use providing important context about earth for various projects. Add to this the increasing number of data capture methods such as drones, micro-satellites and GPS-enabled smartphone apps, and the amount of data being created is immense. Which is timely because the thirst for information is hard to quench, as important projects that shape our planet are launching daily relating to infrastructure, utilities, agriculture, property, environment…the list is big.

The issue however, is data access. Whether that’s controlled access within private groups or open access for anyone who wants it – finding, appraising, reformatting and ultimately accessing geospatial and related data is time consuming and hard.

While desktop software has helped create and make use of datasets, the associated technology and business model developed over the last few decades has resulted in a silo effect for data. Vendors try to solve the problem with bespoke portals or viewers which only lock down the flow of data even more to those who have licenses. These GIS viewers and low-end data publishing methods appear to be bolt-on afterthoughts designed to tick boxes more than address the needs of people using the data.

Cloud technology, with its DNA embedded in connecting and sharing, is more suited to removing the friction between the publishers and managers of data, and the people who use it in their work.

By making use of this technology to bring geospatial and related data online in a structured, relational way, we’re able to solve the data access problem for both data publishers and the professionals wanting to use it. Creating this ecosystem in the cloud comes with some useful benefits:

• Users can connect to the service anytime and anywhere there’s an internet connection
• A true multi-tenanted solution ensures everyone is always on the latest version with continuous updates happening in the background, lower costs from shared infrastructure, high reliability and uptime
• Datasets can be found and explored more easily, either via search engines like google or logged directly into a publisher’s site for sensitive or private data
• Publishers make their data available once, then everyone with the right permission level can appraise and access whichever bits they want – making the overhead of servicing data requests a thing of the past
• Storing the datasets in a cloud hosted environment provides industry leading security while reducing operational overheads
• The relational nature of the storage means related datasets can be easily layered together, or new datasets derived by combining parts of existing datasets
• Publishers can get a new level of analytics and insights into the use of their data that aren’t available in the desktop world

Finally, and it’s worth breaking this point out, one of the biggest benefits of a cloud ecosystem built around data like this, is the ability to share and collaborate on live data. With updates to source data flowing through seamlessly from publishers, people using the data can choose to work with the latest update or maintain their current version if necessary. This fundamentally changes the value of data for both the people managing it and those using it.

So as cloud technology matures to handle the relatively complex nature of geospatial and related data, the business models and subsequent economics associated with making data available are also evolving. Which is great for those responsible for publishing and sharing their data, as staff and infrastructure costs reduce, data dissemination increases exponentially, and ultimately those accessing the data to shape our planet are able to do so faster and easier than ever before.

The game has changed. Find out more and see if your organisation is ready for cloud publishing technology at try.koordinates.com.