Development and Evaluation of a New Platform for Accelerating Cross-Domain Data Exchange and Cooperation

The technologies for collecting and analyzing data are developing significantly, enabling us to gain new knowledge from various types of data. Recently, the considerably increasing expectation for cross-domain data exchange and cooperation has attracted attention from data markets. However, as we lack data-utilization knowledge, an accurate evaluation of data is difficult; a non-price indicator for deciding the exchange of data is needed. Thus, in this study, we propose a new online platform for stakeholders to communicate regarding data utilization. Our online platform, called Web Innovators Marketplace on Data Jackets (Web IMDJ), is built with reference to the process of IMDJ workshops. Web IMDJ is superior to the conventional paper-based IMDJ (hereafter, Table IMDJ) in terms of reducing the burden on conducting workshops. Notably, Table IMDJ and Web IMDJ have different communication media, and this may affect the data-utilization knowledge proposed in the workshop. Therefore, we conducted workshops on both platforms under a controlled experimental environment to compare the proposed data-utilization knowledge. Consequently, the knowledge proposed in Web IMDJ gained equal or higher ratings by third-party evaluators (those who did not join in the experimental workshop). By contrast, subjects themselves evaluated the knowledge proposed in Table IMDJ as superior to Web IMDJ. These results revealed that both workshops have advantages as data-utilization platforms. Furthermore, we derived the best practices to utilize data effectively from a detailed analysis of the data obtained from the experimental workshops.