Open Data Is Dead | Hacker News Reader

Open Data Is Dead

databaseengineering.substack.com

34 pointsjasondc9 comments

I think this headline was poorly chosen.

When I see the term "Open Data" I instantly think of open data portals - mostly run by governments around the world. These things have never been healthier: ten years ago they hardly existed, today you can get civic data from local governments all over the place (last time I saw an attempt to count there were over 4,000 of these portals, and that was a few years ago).

My favourite example is still this CSV of all 190,000+ trees in San Francisco, which is updated most business days with details of the latest tree changes: https://data.sfgov.org/City-Infrastructure/Street-Tree-List/... - I track changes to it here: https://github.com/simonw/sf-tree-history/

This article is about something different: it's about what I guess you could call the "Open APIs" movement. Back in the days of Web 2.0 every service was launching an open API, hoping to harness developer attention to help make the platforms more sticky. Facebook and Twitter both did incredibly well out of this strategy, at least at first.

THOSE APIs are mostly on the way out now. Companies realized that giving away their data for free has a lot of disadvantages.

Open Data is doing great. Open APIs are not.

Agree with that important distinction. I work on open data in my day job, it's going like gangbusters—shockingly enough to me. The public web, on the other hand, is now a labyrinth of moats, each with its own toll bridge.

Indeed, the trend in corporations is to be actively hostile to web scrapers as well. Programmatic access is not encouraged so they can sell more ads.

I wouldn't have considered any of the four bullet points "open data". I would consider

https://data.gov/

Wikidata and many other things "open". It's my own (partially true) opinion that open data is downloadable as a data dump, anything involving an API is like breathing through a straw.

perfectly said!

None of those things are "Open Data". They might have provided access to the data via an API, but OSM, Wikipedia etc. are open data.

...

Ah, it's a veiled advert for "Sort".

Companies threatened that other companies will scrap everything for AI, and replace them, have to build fences.

I thought it's going to be about OData, the "Open Data Protocol": https://www.odata.org/

Every comment so far is critiquing the author's choice of words, but no one has offered a better one.

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