American businessman
American businessman
Born: 1974
Alternative Names:
Auren Raphael Hoffman
From Wikidata (CC0)
This is the #1 thing that most people who work at data companies do not understand. Most people think that they need to hoard the data. But the data increases in value if it can be combined with other interesting datasets. So you should do everything you can to help your customers combine your data with other data. One way to make data easy to combine is to purposely think about linking it — essentially creating a foreign key for other datasets.
The more connected a dataset is to other data elements, the more valuable it is. And the easier it is to link your data, the more valuable it becomes. The reason for this is simple: data is only as useful as the questions it can help answer. Joining, linking, and graphing datasets together allows one to ask more and different kinds of questions.