Unlocking the Potential of AI with Open Data

Summary

With over 100 million users, GitHub is the world's largest platform for collaborative software development. Also used extensively for open data collaboration—which means that data are freely and readily available to users—GitHub hosts more than 800 million open data files, totaling 142 terabytes of data. This chapter discusses the potential of open data on GitHub and how open data can accelerate artificial intelligence research. It explores GitHub's open data landscape and patterns of how users share datasets. Artificial intelligence has the potential to facilitate digital innovation, promote experimentation, improve efficiency, and accelerate progress in addressing societal issues. By providing large quantities of data that are readily available for use in developing artificial intelligence‐powered models, open data is foundational to realizing this potential. Licensing protocols offer clarity on how data can be used, shared, or attributed, and GitHub attempts to automatically classify repositories based on known licenses.