from Hacker News

Open Data Is Dead

by jasondc on 11/1/23, 7:26 PM with 9 comments

  • by simonw on 11/1/23, 11:07 PM

    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.

  • by PaulHoule on 11/1/23, 7:30 PM

    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.

  • by milliams on 11/1/23, 10:55 PM

    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".

  • by renegat0x0 on 11/2/23, 8:09 AM

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

  • by rzzzt on 11/1/23, 11:57 PM

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

  • by jonny_eh on 11/1/23, 11:22 PM

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