External Data: Everything You Need To Know

What is external data?

External data (also called third party data) is all data you receive from outside of your own systems (both on-premise and cloud). External data may be open data from governments, second party data from partners, third party data you purchase from data aggregators, or commercial data from professional data providers.

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External data enrichment

In many cases, external data is used to enrich internal data within a company. External data enrichment describes this process of matching data from outside of an organization with data inside an organization. In order to correctly match internal and external data, you need a match key for each object in a database - or a fuzzy matching algorithm.

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External data providers

There are tens of thousands of data providers for external data. In general, you can classify external data providers into three (3) categories:

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• Commercial data providers: They sell external data with commercial support, usually with a data license or data subscription.
• Open data providers: Usually government bodies such as cities or countries offering open data to their citizens for free (or for a fee)
• Partnership data providers: Some companies also decide to exchange data with partners (either free or for a fee) in order to improve both their business processes. Data from partners is also considered external data.