Open Data, Smarter AI

Data is growing exponentially. By 2025 our global datasphere will grow close to 163 zettabytes, which is 163 trillion gigabytes. This is an enormous amount of data and the growth rate is increasing by day. But are all these data publicly accessible? The answer is no.

“Open data is data that can be freely used, shared and built-on by anyone, anywhere, for any purpose.”

Open data provides the way to publish the data publicly and opens the data repository to access from web or mobile application. APIs to access through REST, SOAP or any web services made it very easy to get access to open data. Even many organizations are building client libraries for their data to make it accessible to any interested parties. Additionally, migrating data to cloud storage is a huge milestone in data accessibility. Cloud are hosting open data repositories and using the powerful engine for data analysis, predictive analysis, machine learning, IoT etc. Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and Amazon AWS are the leading names in the market right now. Although primarily open data was a mere concepts but with the progress of AI, open data are getting more attention.     

In an artificial intelligence (AI) system data is the main food. More the data, more comprehensive and better the decision is. An artificial intelligent incorporates neural networking, machine learning and deep learning. Machine learning uses algorithm to parse and learn about the data, and finally takes informed decision about what it has learned about the data so far. And in deep learning it can take intelligent decisions of its own based on the neural network design. So the data feeds AI to take a human like decision in a real life situation. And open data can play an important role in this by providing AI system to access an enormous datasphere of zettabytes of data.     

Internet of Things (IoT) will be the largest generator of data in coming years. According to researches IoT is building the platform to connect possibly every devices in the world. All the new devices hardware and firmware are designed keeping IoT connectivity in mind. Wearable devices, sensors, equipment, utility devices and many more are the major contributor in generating data. By 2025, average connected person will interact 4,800 times a day with connected devices! And companies willingly making these data open to public and uploading all the data to cloud, unless there is any business or security concerns. Many government sectors are following the path opening up their data for intelligent decisions, such as – CENSUS data, migration, weather, economy, production, health, transport and many more. Government has years of data that are unused and sitting idle for decades. Opening up these data for research has brought a great success in the development of AI.    

With these ocean of open data AI can take more informative and smarter decisions. To train and build the machine learning model developers will take advantage of open data. Open data can make the AI smarter; the rest depends on the how the AI system is designed and algorithms.