The Open Data Movement and Google’s new Dataset Search

07 September 2018

Sitewisely supports the Open Data movement. We unify open street maps, demographic data, land use and planning, socioeconomic data and more to help facilitate your ease of access, usability and analysis of the data required to help with site selection, within one platform.

Why Dataset Search is needed

Agencies around the world are now publishing their data on open data portals. However, the publication of these datasets is fragmented, and they can be hard to locate due to different agencies utilising different repositories. Google has identified the need to aggregate this information by creating a universal dataset search engine. Dataset Search is the Google Scholar equivalent for open datasets. With the power of Google’s search engine turned to open data, finding useful datasets for your business just got a lot easier.

What datasets can you find through Dataset Search?

The initial release covers environmental and social sciences, government data, and news organisations. Google anticipates that as the service gains popularity the data it indexes will quickly grow as more repositories convert their datasets to meet mettadata standards and more institutions join the open data movement and make their information openly accessible.

How this improves your experience with Sitewisely

Sitewisely has always been about open data. We want to incorporate all of the open data that will best help you, into the platform. If you find a dataset on Google’s Dataset Search that you’d like to utilise in the platform then let us know and we’ll import it!