
What kinds of open data would developers pay to access via an API? - JamesBrill
What kinds of open data would developers pay to access via an API? A lot of open data is either hard to access, hard to find or in an unusual format. Let&#x27;s say it was cleaned up, aggregated over a whole country or region, and exposed on a RESTful API with beautiful documentation. What kind of open data do you wish had this treatment?
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tixocloud
The kind of data that would help us to make decisions.

I would personally be interested in social media and web analytics data. Those
are the only 2 I can think of that are open. I know it's out there but
something simplified would be nice instead of us having to process and store
every single tweet, like, etc.

There are many other types of data that I would love but are either owned by
other corporations or are too expensive for a startup.

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AznHisoka
What do you think about BuzzSumo data?

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tixocloud
BuzzSumo data would be interesting. I'd have to look deeper into it.

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xfour
I'ts incredible how many businesses revolve around this, you have the obvious
ones like Lexus Nexis, but even more in the housing space you have the
regional MLS's sole purpose of existence is to be the keeper of the data.
Again in the housing space companies like First American just index the public
records data. I can't say just because it's on an API with good documentation
there's anything positive to come from paid access to open data. It's just a
business model that seems wrong.

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AznHisoka
Why does it seem wrong if they do the heavy lifting of crawling/indexing all
the data so you don't have to?

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id122015
I'd pay to use data about politics/governments. Who? How many? How Much ? We
never know anything about the taxes we pay.

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skram
Consider checking out US Dept of Commerce's Census of Governments - it has a
lot of information. There's also a big trend of state/local governments
opening their budgets and expenditures to the public in new and engaging ways.
Some examples:

\- [http://www.checkbooknyc.com/](http://www.checkbooknyc.com/)

\-
[http://budget.dallasopendata.com/#!/year/default](http://budget.dallasopendata.com/#!/year/default)

\-
[http://miamidade.budget.finance.socrata.com/#!/year/default](http://miamidade.budget.finance.socrata.com/#!/year/default)

\-
[http://budget.topeka.org/#!/year/default](http://budget.topeka.org/#!/year/default)

* Disclaimer: I work for Socrata which powers all of the above links except for NYC Checkbook

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matheweis
Retail/grocery pricing information. This barely exists in any capacity and is
a literal goldmine once your database reaches critical mass.

On the other hand, it is fairly difficult data to gather - and even harder to
keep up to date... it certainly falls into the class of "doing things that
don't scale"

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ak39
Market data (closing prices good enough) including Indices data.

Bloomberg and Reuters are a monopoly.

Macro economic data (eg inflation, GDP) (the ones published by WB and
sovereign states)

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apahwa
better mapping data, give us Geo boundaries for cities and zipcodes etc. give
us a database of all government land like schools, airports, parks, etc and
appropriate Geo boundaries associated with them. this is a huge issue for
delivery services right now, particularly those in the growing MMJ market
where you cannot deliver to federal land or near schools

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max_
-Weather -Time {time is not the same around the world} -Pricing of generic s stuff, gold, wheat, across multiple locations

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stephenr
You want to pay for a service, to convert times between timezones?

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edoceo
Lots of open government provided data (eg: FOIA) is explicitly restricted from
resale and many other use-cases.

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cloudjacker
most financial data, but xignite is already charging for it

really annoying that the price on this hasn't come down yet

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nwrk
there are separate licensing fees for financial data distribution

order of magnitude higher ^2 than 'for consumption' personal use

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cloudjacker
I'm aware, that doesn't excuse the old antiquated formats they are using, or
the ridiculous pricing model they use, or the lack of support for accessing
this data in an efficient way

It isn't an efficient market and I am expressing my discontent with it.

There should have been a race to the bottom with pricing over a decade ago.

