Data Just Right: Introduction to Large-Scale Data & Analytics

2. Hosting and Sharing Terabytes of Raw Data

Poor fellow, he suffers from files.

—Aneurin Bevan

The two truths of the Internet are “no one knows you’re a dog,” and it’s easy to share lots of data with the world—right?

Sharing large amounts of open data should be common practice for governments and research organizations. Data can help inform intelligent policy making as well as provide innovative kindling for investigative journalism, but it’s not really easy to find public and municipal datasets. In fact, municipalities that provide loads of publicly available data are often celebrated in the media as innovative pioneers rather than competent governments just doing their jobs. Even when data is freely available, it can be shared using data formats ...