Imagine what amazing applications would be created if every programmer in the world had free access to all of these data sets:

• Map data for all countries in a relatively uniform data format
• White pages data (names and addresses) for all cities of the world
• Stock data for all major exchanges for all time
• Movie showtimes data for all cities in the world
• Television schedule data for all cities in the world
• Sports scores and stats for all sports in the world for all time
• Rich meta data for all musical albums and movies from all labels for all time

The interesting thing is, almost every internet company would benefit if this data were freely available. Most internet companies have embraced open source operating systems because every company needs an operating system, and no company wants their OS to be a competitive advantage – they just want it to work. I would argue we are all in the same boat with these factual data sources. No one really wants factual data accuracy and completeness to be their competitive advantage; we all want the best data possible to build the best products possible, and discrepancies in data quality are artifacts of the extremely inefficient economy of buying and selling data we currently live in. If everyone had the same, high quality data, all of our products would be better for it.

We should create a Wikipedia for data: a global database for all of these important data sources to which we all contribute and that anyone can use.

the mainstream waking up to opendata, perhaps?

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