You may have noticed I’ve been talking about linked data and linked open data. Strictly speaking, linked data doesn’t have to be openly licensed for reuse, but when it is you increase the likelihood of people consuming your data and all these wonderful network effects become possible.
In fact there’s a star rating system for ranking the openness of your data. At the most basic level, just publish your raw data now under an open licence creative commons will do. Doesn’t matter which format–it can even be a scanned image. To earn your second star, publish it in some kind of structured format. Even an Excel spreadsheet is fine, as long as you’re okay with people taking it and using it. If you use a non-proprietary format (so CSV instead of Excel) that gets you three stars. Four stars is for thinking at web-scale. Using those URI addresses to refer to your things, so that people can point to them from across the web. But the grand prize is the five star rating, which is about relationships.
Link your data to other data so that both consumer and publisher benefit from the network effect.