Rhm2ktmi's List: Data aaS & OpenData

• Open data makes great promises and offers untapped benefits for individual, public and private decision-making. However, these benefits often come with hidden costs and risks. Taking some inspiration from “A theory of the calculus of voting”, we present a modest attempt at formalizing a “calculus of open data” to help data providers make this decision.
• We briefly start with a few selected examples to highlight the value and impact of open data and the need for a better decision framework when choosing to open data.

• The topic of data ethics is filled with many complications that often conflict with enterprise goals. Combined with daily job responsibilities it can be difficult to know where to start when it comes to exploring the complexities of the issues involved.
• However, an overly narrow perspective on any one individual aspect of data ethics — privacy, for example — obscures a broader picture that would otherwise inform data handling practices that provide businesses with a competitive advantage.
• There is, however, a competitive advantage to engaging and intentionally exploring the data ethics landscape.
• Key highlights from this report include

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• Big Data as a Service, as defined in a lengthy research piece in Service Technology Magazine by Varun Sharma, an enterprise solutions architect, is a recommended framework "to enable information availability to consumers via reports, discovery services, etc., through the reuse of data services, promoting best practices in data management using data modeling and metadata services."
• No, said Nick Heudecker, research director for information management at Gartner. "A hybrid deployment makes sense," he said. "Doing some processing in the cloud makes sense, and doing some on premises makes sense. If you have data coming in from cloud services, you can deploy a collection management infrastructure in the cloud, do analytics on it and move it through on premises services. You don't want to move everything to the cloud."
• He’s not sold on the concept of BDaaS being a pure cloud play the way SalesForce is a pure cloud play or Softlayer is a pure on-demand platform provider.
• "Big Data as a Service is nonsense from start to finish. There are too many things to do and integrate in a pure cloud play. You're talking enterprise data warehousing, Hadoop, RDBMS, event processing, NoSQL, in-memory databases and a variety of other things. If all of that is encompassed in Big Data, how can you realistically get that as a service?" he said.
• BDaaS ideal for faster deployment because people can provision the resources they need, then deprovision them after the work is done and not be saddled with a lot of hardware, Myers notes.

• Services provider CSC is a proponent of BDaaS and it also advocates the hybrid model. "It's a world where the end state is to get as much data as you possibly can," said Jim Kaskade, vice president and general manager of Big Data and analytics at CSC.

   

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• Network World just published a list of what they feel are the leading Cloud databases moving into 2013. They singled out Amazon’s line of Cloud-hosted databases, including DynamoDB on the NoSQL side of the ship, as well as Amazon Relational Database (RDS) for those desiring a more traditional model. RDS provides instances of MySQL, SQL Server or Oracle. Additionally, Amazon offers Amazon SimpleDB, a schema-less option suitable for smaller data sets.

• A few data sets are accessible from our data science apprenticeship web page.
• You can find additional data sets at the Harvard University Data Science website. I was particularly interested in their LinkedIn data set. KDNuggets is also a great resource, and for more, check out this link.

• 60 Minutes, for instance, took a closer look this past weekend at how data brokers are tapping a growing number of sources to compile evermore specialized lists. Many of the lists, which are typically sold to marketers, cover some very private topics:

   

• Right now, the Federal Trade Commission is conducting an investigation of nine major brokers — Acxiom, Corelogic, Datalogix, eBureau, ID Analytics, Intelius, Peekyou, Rapleaf, and Recorded Future – to see how they are using consumer information.

   

• Search for data, and get updates from datasets and groups that you're interested in.
• Publish or register datasets, create and manage groups and communities.

• World Bank Open Data: free and open access to data about development in countries around the globe.

• Pew Research Center makes its data available to the public for secondary analysis. See below for more information and contact us at info@pewresearch.org with any questions.

• AWS hosts a variety of public data sets that anyone can access for free.
• Previously, large data sets such as the mapping of the Human Genome required hours or days to locate, download, customize, and analyze. Now, anyone can access these data sets and analyze them using Amazon EC2 instances or Amazon EMR (Hosted Hadoop) clusters. By hosting this important data where it can be quickly and easily processed with elastic computing resources, AWS hopes to enable more innovation, more quickly.

• In 2011 European Commissioner Neelie Kroes put up a proposal to open up Europe’s Public Data for everyone to use. Neelie Kroes is a strong supporter of the use of public datasets and she called governments to put online datasets that were created with public money. Also the United Stated sees many chances for public data. Obama launched a big data initiative worth $ 200 million in 2012 to investigate the big data opportunities and technologies.

• The Open Data 500 is the first comprehensive study of U.S. companies that use open government data to generate new business and develop new products and services. The Open Data 500 study is funded by the Knight Foundation and conducted by the GovLab. Open data is free, public data that anyone can use to launch commercial and nonprofit ventures, do research, make data-driven decisions, and solve complex problems.

• This post is the 8th of a continuing series of interviews with OpenStack Project Technical Leads on our Mirantis blog. Our goal is to educate the broader tech community and help people understand how they can contribute to and benefit from OpenStack. Naturally, these are the opinions of the interviewee, not of Mirantis.