Challenges and Governance Solutions for Data Science Services based on Open Data and APIs
This work tackles practical problems for developers and organizations using open data for service creation, but it is incremental as it focuses on governance improvements rather than novel technical breakthroughs.
The paper addresses challenges in building data science services using open data and APIs, specifically in marine traffic in Finland and Sweden, and proposes governance solutions to alleviate issues like data relevance, historical data, licensing, runtime quality, and API evolution.
Increasingly common open data and open application programming interfaces (APIs) together with the progress of data science -- such as artificial intelligence (AI) and especially machine learning (ML) -- create opportunities to build novel services by combining data from different sources. In this experience report, we describe our firsthand experiences on open data and in the domain of marine traffic in Finland and Sweden and identified technological opportunities for novel services. We enumerate five challenges that we have encountered with the application of open data: relevant data, historical data, licensing, runtime quality, and API evolution. These challenges affect both business model and technical implementation. We discuss how these challenges could be alleviated by better governance practices for provided open APIs and data.