Harnessing The Power Of Raw Public Data
May 28, 2013
The Internet allows multiple data streams to converge and release their data to end users, but very few people know how to explicitly use the public data much less on how to find it. There is a solution reports TechCrunch in the article, “Enigma Makes Unearthing And Sifting Through Public Data A Breeze.” Enigma is a New York startup with Hicham Oudghiri, Marc Dacosta, and CEO Jeremy Bronfmann on the team. The company’s software pulls data from over 100,000 public data sources and it pools the data in easy-to-read tables.
“That’s all very neat, but how does Enigma do it? The data itself comes from a host of places, but most of Enigma’s government data was obtained by issuing a Freedom of Information Act request to the U.S. General Services Administration for all the top level .gov domains. From there the team uses crawlers to download all the databases it can find, and algorithmically finds connections between all those data points to create a sort of public knowledge graph. Whenever you search for a term on Enigma, Enigma actually searches around that term to figure out and display whatever applicable data sets it can find.”
Enigma should be seen more as an infrastructure search solution and the company heads believe it could become an integral part of the Internet in five years. As a tool, it has many benefits for researchers and already it has made partnerships with the New York Times, Capital IQ, S&P Capital, Gerson Lehrman Group, and the Harvard Business School. The startup company is an enterprise at the moment, but there are possible plans for a free version in the future. Enigma pulls all its data from public resources, but it must comply with laws and regulations that come with the information. Enigma wants to play by the rules, but by playing within the bounds it hopes to become a dispenseless tool.
Whitney Grace, May 28, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
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