The golden data...Part1

Data is gold. The global digital business thrives on data received, manipulated, analyzed and monetized. Data in business community is a shark world and the control of the abuse of data sets by various developed economy seems not to be tight enough to protect the consumers. The research community is not immune from this shark world although most donor funded research expects that data be made available to the public, the extent to which the published datasets could be trusted is another cause of concern. Another concern is the protection of personally identifiable information of consumers whose data has been transformed into gold mine. The gold diggers are having their fills with data collected from consumers in the name of freebies online.

In another clime, researchers sometime gather data that may be sensitive, especially in health and social science field. In most cases, donor funded research are required to be open access. This implies that the publications and the data gathered during the research should be made available to the public at no cost. It may only require giving credit to the author. The fact that someone might have done massive work to gather certain data for a specific research and made open is not enough for the same data to be commercialized by another for personal gain without giving credit to the author – knowledge and intellectual property theft.

Despite the concerns of researchers, open data is creating new business opportunities for start-ups. The availability of data affords data scientists to create solutions across different sectors. One of the greatest beneficiaries of this open data is agriculture. Technologies like the Nuru and SeedTracker have impacted farming systems possibly in sub-Saharan African. These apps leverage on open data to produce solutions that address concerns in the 3rd world.

The data ecosystem is dynamic. Technologies are being developed to meet the expectations of tomorrow and most of these depend on data. Block-chain technologies can be used in almost every industry today and robotics relies on machine learning which relies on data analysis for best performance. The result is endless.

Precious is the discovery of data but the manipulation, utilization and adaptation of it to solve today and future problem is the beginning of wisdom

Obileye Olatunbosun Matthew (ORCID ID: 0000-0002-1200-0994)