Open Data Now: The Secret to Hot Startups, Smart Investing, Savvy Marketing, and Fast Innovation (Business Books)

“computational social science.”

The idea is to use computer software to do what people do, which is read text and make sense of it in some kind of situational framework.”

Miller described how Influence Explorer can show that a major company is one of the biggest spenders on lobbying and campaign contributions, show how many executives it has on federal advisory committees and how much it receives in federal grants and contracts, and show how many times it’s been cited by the EPA.

By using smart applications of Open Data, enticing website design, and clever marketing, consumer choice engines can have a chance of success.

As he has pointed out, the hard-to-navigate system of government contracting favors established, expensive vendors who know the system.

While InnoCentive is largely focused on solving scientific research problems, the same approach could be used to predict the results of online promotions or marketing campaigns.

Sentiment analysis deals with the potential biases of Twitter, blogs, and various review sites by aggregating and analyzing Open Data from all of them, in the hope that the combined data will be more representative and accurate.

The turning point came when Bloomberg developed its Consumer Complaint Index, rating companies based on sentiment analysis of their customers’ online comments.

Finally, there are companies that offer different kinds of infrastructure—companies that design databases or cloud hosting systems that can help run these systems more cheaply.