Open Data Infomediaries
In open data ecosystems, data producers and data consumers are not necessarily directly connected. Sometimes, data producers might be government agencies or public companies that are forced to publish data by law and have little interest in making it high-quality and easy to use. Other times, the value of data might come from the aggregation and standardization of many data sets from diverse sources.
In these cases, so-called Infomediaries can take data from producers and add value by, for example, cleaning the data, merging data sets from multiple sources, or providing more stable infrastructure. Finally, they republish the improved data. In this way, they become intermediate consumers of data that improve the open data ecosystem both for producers and for consumers (for a nice summary, read Zuiderwijk et al. (2014)1).
A very broad definition of Infomediaries (and an overview of other definitions) can be found in the systematic literature review by Shaharudin et al. (2023)2:
Third-party actors who provide specialized resources and capabilities to (i) enhance the supply, flow, and/or use of open data and/or (ii) strengthen the relationships among various open data stakeholders.
I like this definition because it includes actors who contribute knowledge, budget or connections (like journalists) and does not just focus on technical contributions. In fact, when we worked on our paper on challenges in open collaborative data engineering3, one insight from interviews was that practitioners considered the exchange and connections created by journalists to be essential.
Examples
Some examples for open data Infomediaries are:
- Open data foundations, Overture Maps
- Research data repositories, refine.bio
- Providers of alternate data formats, Pirate Weather
- Civic activists, Nos Députés
Footnotes
-
Zuiderwijk, A., Janssen, M., & Davis, C. (2014). Innovation with open data: Essential elements of open data ecosystems. Information Polity, 19(1,2), 17–33. https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&doi=07bc6a8a6ec78e4311b5b3bf513f1cba585b3d7a ↩
-
Shaharudin, A., van Loenen, B., & Janssen, M. (2023). Towards a Common Definition of Open Data Intermediaries. Digit. Gov.: Res. Pract., 4(2), 1–21. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3585537 ↩
-
Heltweg, P., & Riehle, D. (2023). A Systematic Analysis of Problems in Open Collaborative Data Engineering. Trans. Soc. Comput., 6(3-4), 1–30. https://www.heltweg.org/posts/a-systematic-analysis-of-problems-in-open-collaborative-data-engineering/ ↩