Data Sharing: The Best Way To Better Data

A Quick History of Data Sharing – a Novel Approach in Data Quality Management

From scientific research to powerful solution – the CDQ Data Sharing Platform

In 2006, CDQ started as a research project – 10 leading European companies tired of their data quality problems banded together with data scientists from the Swiss University of St. Gallen and decided to develop new approaches in data quality management. One of the ideas that came from that research: companies that sell to the same customer or buy from the same vendor should be able to share their business partner information with each other. Instead of everybody updating the same record individually, why not share the good data with each other?

Today, this idea born out of science has become a reality – international companies use the CDQ Data Management Services to share the burden of data maintenance, and to jointly improve data quality to levels unreachable for a single entity. This simple solution is enabled by complex data quality and governance rules in the background that ensure no sensitive data is exchanged, and that companies can still mix their own quality requirements with the over 1200 standard rules the platform offers.

Data Sharing – a known concept in science and health research, but new to data quality management

If you enter Data Sharing into a search engine, you quickly realize: the term has been around for some time. Uses range from medical researchers offering anonymized clinical or scientific health data to each other, to applications working with the same server-side database, to families sharing Internet access on their cell phone plans.

CDQ now adds another definition to Data Sharing – global companies sharing non-competitive master data with each other, for the purpose of higher data quality and higher efficiency at the same time. We believe that in today's shareconomy, it was about time to bring this idea to data quality management.

Open Data – governments share their best information with you

All around the world, governments open their registries for open access – you can look up official data of all companies registered in France, the UK, in most states in the US and in dozens of other countries. For free! You won’t find better data if you want to know the Tax ID of a supplier or how legitimate a new customer is.

The CDQ Data Sharing platform can be your broker into the world of Open Data. You can use the official records to keep your inhouse data current, and to add/update fields where your internal records are outdated or incomplete. We call this data enrichment, and we are continuously linking new shared data sources to our platform.

Sometimes, it has to be premium (data)

Some data crucial for your company's success is not free but needs to be acquired. For example, if you look for very precise geo-locations, providers will charge you for it. We call this premium data.

Another example: If you want to understand the financial ties between several of your business partners, nothing beats the hierarchy information Dun & Bradstreet provides. In many industries, D&B’s so-called DUNS number is THE unique identifier for companies you are doing business with. CDQ has partnered up with Bisnode, the European partner of the D&B network, to provide Data Sharing customers access to this wealth of information directly from the CDQ platform. This offers customers of Bisnode and CDQ the most powerful combination: the best data from Bisnode/D&B, automatically selected for only the customers and vendors you actually do business with!

Contact us if you want to learn about latest research trends in Data Quality Management!