Why Pay for Data? Even Pirate Attacks are Free!
October 17th, 2007by Sean Gorman
We've been playing around lately with some new data visualization techniques, so I started poking around to see what approaches have been generating buzz of late. In the process I came across Stamen Design's very cool "Oakland CrimeSpotting" via Brady's post on O'Reilly Radar. We'd been really impressed with what they did at Where 2.0 with Trulia and their latest further pushes the frontier.
Once I was done being wowed by the visual I found, Stamen had some thoughts similar to ourselves on the importance of public data being more accessible to...well the public. Specifically,
"We’ve found ourselves frustrated by the proprietary systems and long disclaimers that ultimately limit information available to the public. As citizens we have a right to public information. A clear understanding of our environment is essential to an informed citizenry."
That is the biggest mission of GeoCommons and it is encouraging to see other folks feel similarly. The sad thing is that in order to gain easy access to much of this data folks pay third party providers. One of our developers, Minh, passed along a list of data you can buy from Pushpin, including ESRI supplied Census data. Census data comes from the government, all our tax dollars pay for it - why do we pay twice? I'm not intending to pick on ESRI or Pushpin - the whole industry does it, and for many free data sources other than Census.
The good news is there has been a real ground swell to change the market. Whether it is OpenStreetMaps, ShapeWiki, or OpenAerialMaps crowdsourcing geodata or Swivel and WeoGeo opening up public data for easy consumption there is some real momentum to change the market place and business model. Specifically on the Census front Bill, aka Mr Data McFindsAlot, just posted up Census tract level data for the entire US by state. You can download any of it as KML or access it through our data and mapping API's. Census data, though, is just the tip of the iceberg of whats out there. My latest favorite "Pirate Attacks" a detailed dataset with lat long locations of real deal pirate attacks last year.
Popularity: 17% [?]
October 18th, 2007 at 7:39 pm
As data junkies and map junkies, we enjoyed your pirate map. There has definitely been a sea-change (pun intended) in the availability of mappable free data. We think GeoCommons is a seminal development in that area, and we completely agree that public data should always be free and public.
It seems you were implying that commercial data has no reason to exist, however. With this we disagree.
As you know, the best commercial data vendors add significant value to public datasets before they sell their product. For example, when it comes to the current and 5-year forward demographic projections that are used in many serious business and government applications, the assumptions, sampling, econometric expertise, and simply well-honed judgment that commercial vendors bring is critical. When you buy commercial data you are paying for work that happens after it was captured that makes it current and relevant. Free 2000 data is great to have, but not good enough for every application.
Now as we see it, commercial data has been out of reach cost wise for many (perhaps most) applications that could use it. That’s why we have a unique pricing model that charges by transaction rather than by data set. Our customers pay only for what they use. So we think of this as a way of democratizing commercial data – not as cheap as free, of course, but outstanding value nevertheless.
And by the way, our thematic map API (http://www.pushpin.com/demo) works just as well for free data as for commercial data.
Thanks for GeoCommons, fortiusone guys!
- The Pushpin Developer Team
October 22nd, 2007 at 12:52 pm
[…] FortiusOne, in building their geodata, wonder aloud again over openness — with the emerging GeoWeb, won’t all data be really free? Platial, ever sharp on the bottom line, sketch out how free and open data could create business […]