Yes, I think I would totally agree with that. I think there are already examples of where we've seen transformational things being done with government data that's being used by commercial entities.
One of the examples that David will be very familiar with was back in the early days of the City of Vancouver's open data. A local firm of architects here used some open data to predict water levels and the impact that would have on the local downtown area in Vancouver. The comment that I loved about that was that it wasn't that we couldn't get access to this data before as a commercial entity; it was that we didn't know who to talk to. We didn't know how to get this data. It was just too difficult. So the fact that the data was published enabled us to do something new and innovative with that information that helped our business and ultimately benefited our customers.
I think this is a very simple example of how this data can be used in partnership with commercial organizations. Of course data has been commercialized for years. This is nothing new. There are whole industries built on it—advertising, marketing, demographic data, retail analysis data, and organizations around that. This is something that the commercial industry is very familiar with and makes money with in different ways.
I think the key here is to establish the partnerships between the government data sources and those third party commercial sources. Once you start combining the data in this way, transformative things start to happen.
Let me give you another example, again from Vancouver. When Vancouver shared parking data initially, it shared parking data around the use of city-owned meters. It didn't have the commercial parking data because it didn't own that data, so it didn't publish that. The commercial parking companies weren't publishing their data because they were effectively in competition with each other and the city. It actually took a third party developer, an independent developer, to actually take the published City of Vancouver data and the commercial data and combine them. This is something that naturally neither the city nor the parking entity would do off their own bat. It took a third party independent developer to do that.
I think this is the value of these partnerships. By sharing the data in the first place, you can create these chains of reaction. The more partnerships you bring to bear on this, the more valuable the data gets.