The Case for a Data Marketplace
“The vision for ecosystems to start sharing enterprise data sets is yet to materialize. More than any of the other technical reasons that may be quoted here, the most prominent reason is Trust. Public data sets, such as weather, stocks, census etc can be verified, qualified and consumed fairly easily without any larger impact downstream. But, when key business decisions or actionable intelligence need to be arrived at based on enterprise data provided by a 3rd party company, trust becomes a key concern.”
Why it matters:
Aside from the Census and other data sources that are from credible, objective sources, verifying the truth of external datasets is difficult. This prevents many organizations from utilizing data which could advance their models, even if there is room for error. The blockchain has the potential to create an immutable, verifiable, permissioned data marketplace which could unlock a marketplace for utilizing external datasets. The internet has been a democratizing force (WordPress for publishing, YouTube for video) and I look forward to it increasing access to datasets and the new applications.