Definitions

A data marketplace is a website or cloud data platform that enables data providers and data consumers to exchange or share data products in a frictionless manner.

Data providers turn internal or external data into data products that they publish on the data marketplace. Data consumers browse a catalog of data products to ingest and integrate with internal data to support business processes.

Data providers become data sellers and data consumers become data buyers when there is a commercial transaction that accompanies the exchange of a data product.

Data products are any data assets that can be packaged and published in a searchable product catalog. Datasets are the most common data products, but SQL queries, machine learning models, documents, images, notebooks, and dashboards can also be productized.

A data marketplace runs on a data exchange platform which manages the exchange of data between data providers and data consumers.

A data operator purchases a data exchange platform to run a data marketplace that supports a specific ecosystem, e.g., an industry, a company, a region.

Data sharing (not depicted) is a specific type of data exchange that uses database pointers to provide access to data rather than copying and moving files via SFTP, an API, or download.