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For innovators that want to provide a sustainable service based on open data, one of the main challenges is whether the market is large enough compared to the effort of developing and providing the service.

In this context, a single city is often too small a market to make the service sustainable.

Challenges

From the innovators view, it would be ideal if adding support for an additional city to an existing solution, was as simple as adding another location to retrieve the data from.

In reality, there are several challenges for the innovator, including:

  • The same dataset may not be available in different cities
  • Differences in data structures and coverage of data
  • Licenses or other terms of use may be differ, causing both legal, practical, and technical problems
  • Different data formats may be used
  • API’s for accessing the data may differ substantially

Suggestions

  • Coordinate what and how to publish with other data owners / publishers
  • When possible, use standards or participate in developing them
  • Coordinate with others also on use of licenses and for defining terms of use
  • Keep a dialog with innovators to learn about their needs

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