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Obtaining data isn’t always as easy as it seems. A lot of businesses depend on proprietary data that comes at an unreasonable cost, but what if you could gain valuable insights without spending a fortune? This is where open data sources come in.
The relevance of openly sourced data has increased tremendously. According to the Open Data Barometer, leveraging open data can create an annual economic impact of $3 trillion due to its ability to increase productivity, innovation, and transparency across different sectors. Moreover, a McKinsey report stated that organizations using data are twenty-three times more likely to get new customers, and six times more likely to retain them than other firms.
Open data sources provide publicly available data that businesses, researchers, and data scientists to get relevant insights. Whether your interest is in tracking markets, analyzing customer means, or tracking shifts in industries, these datasets provide ample information.
But how do you utilize open data sources optimally? And how can companies use web scraping to benefit from these data sources? Let’s delve deeper.
What Are Open Data Sources?
Image Source: Opus project
Publicly available open data sources usually have few to zero restrictions and anyone is allowed to use or share them openly. Organizations, governments, and other research institutions disseminate them to foster innovation and promote transparency.
Some of the best open data sources include:
- Government Portals – U.S. government’s data.gov and the European Union’s data.europa.eu provides various datasets on demographics, economy, health, and so on.
- World Bank Open Data – A trustful open data resource for worldwide economic and developmental data.
- Google Dataset Search – A search engine that enables datasets from various publicly accessible files.
- UN Data – The portal provides statistics on global development, population, and climate for the United Nations.
- Kaggle Datasets – An open platform that permits the posting and downloading of data for purposes of machine and data analysis.
These open data sources are useful to businesses for strategic decision-making because they cover industries like healthcare, finance, retailing, and even climate science.
Why Should Businesses Use Open Data Sources?
Image Source: oreilly
1. Cost-Effective Market Research
Rather than buying third-party research reports, a company can obtain the best open data sources needed for analyzing market phenomena. For example, open economic data helps a financial firm in the prediction of the market while public health records aid in drug research for the pharmaceutical industry.
2. Competitive Intelligence
Sourcing data from open data sources allows businesses to track industry changes and see what their competitors are doing. For example, a retailer can use public e-commerce data to study pricing behavior to alter their pricing approach.
3. Consumer Insights and Demand Forecasting
Brands can gain deeper insights into customer preferences through public data. Online reviews, social media discussions, or public survey data analysis allow businesses to predict demand and adjust the supply efficiently sought out.
4. Improving AI and Machine Learning Models
Companies AI and machine learning reliant on data. The challenge many companies face is the gathering of data, which open data sources can help. Businesses can utilize public datasets to help train AI models add automation and increase better decisions.
5. Risk Management and Fraud Detection
Open financial records can be used by banks and financial institutions for risk evaluation and fraud transaction detection. Cybersecurity firms can also utilize information from open data sources to detect potential security risks.
Extracting Strategic Insights with Web Scraping
Even though open data is helpful, the process of gathering and analyzing large data sets manually still takes time. This is automated through web scraping. Web scraping takes the work out of gathering data on certain websites to make it easier to analyze.
Here’s how businesses can use web scraping to make the most of open data sources:
1. Aggregating Market Trends
Tracking consumer spending, industry changes, and inflation is easily achievable by scraping government and financial data portals. For example, analyzing World Bank datasets and correlating them with e-commerce data in real-time can reveal purchasing trends across the globe.
2. Monitoring Public Sentiment
Review websites, social media, and public forums hold key opinions of consumers. Applying web scraping techniques can help brands quantify public sentiment toward their products and competitors. This is great for the retail, hospitality, and technology sectors.
3. Price Tracking and Competitor Analysis
Retailers often scrape data from e-commerce sites to observe price changes, new promotions, and inventory levels. When combined with the best open data sources such as economic indicators, retailers can make informed decisions on how to adjust prices based on supply and demand changes.
4. Identifying Investment Opportunities
Web scraping allows real-time data collection, stock performance, merger announcements, and other changes in the market that investors are looking for to make the right investments based on their specific set criteria.
Challenges and Considerations
Despite open data sources being advantageous, firms must be mindful of some notable obstructions such as:
- Data Accuracy – A plethora of publicly accessible data has not been cross-verified for accuracy. It is best to consult more than one source for validation.
- Legal and Ethical Compliance – Web scraping is only permissible as long as the website’s terms of service and privacy regulations such as GDPR and CCPA are respected.
- Data Cleaning and Processing – Data in its raw form is mostly useless, and often requires some refinement. Enhancing data work with modern processing tools helps improve quality and results.
How PromptCloud Can Help
PromptCloud comes to the rescue here, providing the most sought tools and knowledge to extract insightful information from open data sources. As a frontrunner in providing web scraping services provider, PromptCloud enables firms to efficiently get and utilize large volumes of open data. The processes include:
1. Automated Web Scraping for Open Data
Manual data collection can be slow and inefficient, but with PromptCloud, data is gathered from various channels automatically and in real-time, which means data is both fresh and accurate.
2. Custom Data Extraction
Every business has a different set of requirements, their goals differ as much as financial data, e-commerce, or social sentiment analysis, rest assured that PromptCloud filters to match the expectations.
3. Data Cleaning and Processing
Raw extracted data needs to be cleaned, structured, and formatted to be ready for analysis, which is a time-consuming and laborious process. PromptCloud aims to make this as efficient and easier for users to analyze.
4. Compliance and Security
PromptCloud, like all other businesses, has to abide by the law. Just like any company, we ensure that the data obtained is done so legally, and as a bonus, safely using industry standards.
5. Scalable Solutions
If you need continuous data updates, PromptCloud offers scalable solutions to meet your business’s evolving needs.
Final Thoughts
From the fresh innovations in AI to brand perception analysis, the possibilities are limitless for companies that can welcome free open data sources and incorporate them into their current ecosystem.
Using web scraping tools and techniques allows these companies to convert simple out-of-the-box data into actionable and valuable information, all at a fraction of the cost of proprietary data.
Striking an optimal balance between innovation and open-source data is bound to be the winning formula for staying ahead of the curve and being flexible enough to make the needed changes when aiming for growth.Contact us today and set your business on a path towards hassle-free extraction of open-source data with PromptCloud’s automated web scraping solutions.
