Our Data Manager's discussion of data types distills what he's learned from the past five years of helping our clients achieve their business goals through the effective use of the world's public data sources.
In this age of data explosion, what slows down professionals such as business analysts, corporate investigators, lawyers, journalists, international traders, law enforcement agencies etc. is no longer where to find research materials but how to organize them.
At Rel8ed, our Data Team has one goal: to present curious, actionable data to our clients in a way they’ve never seen before. And it is our Diligence Lead Generation and Investigation Platforms and Kumiho Data Processing Tools that enhance our clients’ capability to use this data. In this article, I'll tell the data story behind our Platform and Tools, and how we reshape the commercial business data world.
The Rel8ed team works in three types of data that are significant for our clients to leverage for their needs:
Open and public data (OPD)
From a client perspective, OPD is data that can be accessible via government-sanctioned portals or public websites. Usually, data like this is freely available: however, the downside of it is that they are often vague, unstructured and not updated frequently.
For example, one client’s project has two OPD datasets, one is a business license dataset in a CSV format and the other is a geospatial dataset in a GIS format. This client needs at least two different software packages to read those files, and needs some coding skills to transform them into a single format to make them useful. Imagine that a client has many datasets from tons of data sources in various formats, how much time will be needed just on sorting them out?
At Rel8ed, our team digests more than 500 public data sources (the number continues to grow) and our system refreshes them every day. Once a client deploys our platform in their environment - onsite or in our cloud - there's no more worry about searching OPD. If the target OPD is not part of our base set, our experienced data gathering team will quickly get the new sources into the platform.
Third-party subscription data (TPD)
TPD refers to information provided by data brokers. Nearly half of all marketers rely on TPD for their projects. In most cases, data quality issues mean they have to employ back-office solutions to verify and clean this data. Since Rel8ed partners with the largest commercial data providers in the world, all a client needs is a token to allow their subscription to flow into our platform. Our Kumiho Data Processing Tools ensure our transformation of TPD is smooth and fast. Presenting curated data from multiple sources is Rel8ed's specialty, and is a big part of our success with large clients.
Internal proprietary data (IPD)
IPD is our clients’ own secret sauce. This kind of data consists of sensitive information, restricted usage data, and regulated records. Our secure data solution team guides a client’s internal data team in their own environment, or customizes a unique data processing flow in our environment to suit their specialized needs. A client’s information is always protected in our secure cloud environments, or safely stored on client site to meet their business needs.
At Rel8ed, we process the world's public data through our Diligence Platform and Kumiho Data Processing Tools. These powerful engines let organizations integrate and work with real world data to achieve their business outcomes. Learn more about these tools by contacting us here.
This post was written by Ren Li.