Economic impacts
This section unpacks the economic benefits of open standards, with focus on how open standards can create new commercial opportunities and provide competitive advantage to organisations that adopt the
Last updated
Was this helpful?
This section unpacks the economic benefits of open standards, with focus on how open standards can create new commercial opportunities and provide competitive advantage to organisations that adopt the
Last updated
Was this helpful?
From transit to procurement, health to weather, open standards create new commercial opportunities and ecosystems that encourage competition. By reducing the barrier to entry and cost associated with combining data in a particular sector, standards enable more organisations to enter the ecosystem to provide products and services. These include translation, conversion, combination, reporting, training, analytics, consumer products, business-to-business services, and more.
Google took advantage of its position as a market leader in transit to launch the (GTFS). It became the de facto standard, overtaking existing standards (TCIP) and (SIRI). Part of the success of GTFS and its real time extension, GTFS-RT, comes from working with competing and legacy standards using tools to make it easy to convert them to GTFS and GTFS-RT.
Standards transform published datasets from opaque, bespoke items to commoditised products. Data users no longer need custom code and processes to use new datasets. With a large enough community, organisations can specialise in providing products and services for each step of the data pipeline including:
data production to map and convert legacy, closed and shared datasets to open standards
data publishing to share data directly with other organisations, through online platforms or by using programmable interfaces like APIs
data acquisition to find and update internal systems with the latest version of shared or open data
data aggregation to combine similar data from different sources for a wider picture that supports insight, prediction and research
data linkage to combine complementary data from various sources and build a richer picture that supports insight and decision making
data analytics to provide insight as a service based on combined, enriched data and expertise
Adopting an open standard for data means an organisation can focus on providing value at any stage along the pipeline. An additional benefit can be certification of compliance from standards bodies, which can act as a badge of trust and build confidence.
The adoption of open standards for market-critical data can cause a shift of power in the market. Open standards can help to disaggregate authority: stakeholders (including market leaders and authorities) stop using bespoke and proprietary formats and instead use cooperatively produced and shared standards. This levels the playing field for data production and data use, allowing new uses of data and new entries to the market.
Publishing and using data is not cost-free. Using data, including open data, needs time and resources to get the data, understand it, transform it to meet your needs, then maintain systems and processes. Publishing data also comes at a cost, from deciding what to publish to supporting use of the data and maintaining systems and processes.
Open standards for data have two main impacts on data use:
Reducing the cost of data production — By adopting a standard, data publishers reduce the work of deciding what to publish and preparing custom guidance. A good data standard developed with a community of interest can also reveal gaps in the publisher’s data so they can improve their internal data use. The costs of understanding the standard and mapping their data to it still remain but should be lower than a bespoke publication. Once internal data is mapped to a data standard, data publishers can focus on improving the quality of their data publications rather than tweaking the structure of their datasets.
Reducing the cost of data use — Even for a single publication, good documentation and a wide community of support reduces the cost of using data and makes using it easier. The savings increase as more data publications use the same standard. There is no need for data users to re-learn how the data is modelled or change the systems and processes used. Data users can focus on how to use the data for maximum impact rather than re-learning the quirks of individual datasets.
is a platform providing access to worldwide procurement data. It uses open data published in a variety of formats and rapidly adopted procurement data published using the . Through its API interface, organisations can access the procurement information they need, speed up insight and reduce their workload.
Before Google launched , other standards supported real time transit information exchange: (SIRI) in Europe and (TCIP). GTFS-RT and its parent standard, the (GTFS), have become de facto for transit thanks to wide adoption and production of open datasets around the world.The standardisation of global transit data supports trip-planning tools like , platforms like , research and . A market has emerged for developing programmes that translate from SIRI, TCIP and other transit standards to GTFS and GTFS-RT, and vice versa.
In the UK, every local authority must publish . Without a standard, anyone trying to understand regional, national or UK-wide spending has to examine each dataset to combine them. Datasets from the same local authorities are not always consistent over time. This increases the cost of using the data. In 2015, the Department for Communities and Local Government provided guidance on what to include as part of the . The guidance is supported by a standard: the .