Data Publica: an Open Data Marketplace

[admin]

Talend has partnered with two French start-ups – Araok, an e-commerce consulting company and Nexedi, the vendor of the open source ERP solution ERP5 – to create a platform for providing data.* Data Publica, which was officially launched today, aspires to offer the first marketplace dedicated to the distribution of all types of data, whether public or not. *Its objective is to facilitate exchanges between publishers of data and Internet or mobile application developers.

Originally developed to create a French public data directory, the platform has been gradually extended to the free or paying distribution of all types of data.* For each data set, Data Publica provides a description, metadata, the name of its publisher and the legal conditions under which it is available. *In practice, the platform stores and indexes related data and metadata to facilitate searches.* In addition, automatic updates are made periodically to add significance to the data (for example, data on car traffic, with a file per hour to describe the progress of this traffic).* Today, Data Publica offers approximately 1,500 sets of data produced by sixty publishers.

The Data Publica project is partially funded by the Directorate General of Competitiveness, Industry and Service (DGCIS), following a call for projects launched by the French government agency responsible for the Strategic Planning and Development of the Digital Economy.* Approved by the Free Software Thematic Group of the Systematic Competition Department, it also fits into the work of Initiative Services Mobile [Mobile Services Initiative] (www.intiative-services-mobiles.org), an operation that supports the development of mobile applications.

In addition to the Nexedi technology, the platform leverages Talend’s data and metadata management tools.* While Talend’s data integration technologies enable data movement and transformations, Talend MDM is used to manage data repositories and approval workflows.* Today, we are very proud to demonstrate in practice that our tools meet these user needs, while offering top-quality performance.

Indeed, Data Publica serves two distinct targets: publishers (meaning any company, institution or other entity that possesses data of general interest: traffic, weather, marriage announcements/births/deaths, demographic studies, etc.) seeking to develop their data, and developers wishing to integrate data to their applications.* The platform also supplies various license texts that can be adopted to distribute data or applications to help these two target groups choose the method of distribution that best suits their purpose.

We are particularly pleased to participate in this type of project which democratizes access to a lot of data, while encouraging the development of Internet and mobile applications.** We are also part of a wider movement (“Open Data”), affecting all industrialized countries and aiming for more transparency through better access to data.

Moreover, the success of Data Publica is such that two heavyweight players are joining us in the project: Inria (National Institute of Research in Computer Science and Control) will contribute its Semantic Web, database and search engine knowledge.* For its part, Atos Origin will provide its high-tech transactional services expertise through Atos Worldline, its expertise center.

Stay tuned, I will keep you posted on the developments of this project.

Bertrand




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