A Curated Compilation of 100 Use Cases (2024-2026) by Stefaan Verhulst and Adam Zable: “The rapid digitization of society has fundamentally transformed the data landscape. Every day, billions of interactions with digital platforms, mobile devices, sensors, financial systems, satellites, connected infrastructure, and other technologies generate unprecedented volumes of information about human behavior, economic activity, environmental change, and public systems. While these data are typically created for operational, commercial, or technological purposes rather than official statistics or research, they increasingly offer valuable opportunities to address public-interest challenges when reused responsibly.
This so-called non-traditional data (NTD) has emerged as an important complement to conventional sources of evidence such as surveys, censuses, administrative records, and official statistics. It can provide information that is more timely, granular, continuous, and behaviorally rich than many traditional datasets, enabling governments, researchers, humanitarian organizations, and civil society to better understand rapidly changing conditions and respond more effectively.
From tracking disease outbreaks and population displacement to monitoring environmental degradation, estimating economic activity, improving disaster response, and informing urban planning, NTD is becoming an increasingly important part of the evidence base that supports public decision-making.
At the same time, the landscape for accessing and reusing non-traditional data is becoming more complex. Growing concerns around privacy, commercial sensitivity, cybersecurity, intellectual property, public trust, and the governance of artificial intelligence have led many organizations to restrict access to valuable datasets, contributing to what has been described as a “data winter”.
This has created a paradox: just as the potential public value of non-traditional data continues to expand, access to many privately held and platform-generated datasets is becoming more constrained. Unlocking that value therefore depends not only on technological innovation but also on effective governance, trusted stewardship, sustainable partnerships, and institutional arrangements that enable responsible data reuse.
Against this backdrop, the purpose of this report is to document how non-traditional data is already being reused in practice. Over the past two years, we have periodically identified and highlighted emerging examples of NTD reuse from around the world. This report brings together 100 curated use cases published between late 2024 and 2026 into a single resource. The compilation does not offer a comprehensive inventory of all existing applications, but seeks to provide a representative snapshot of the current state of practice across different sectors, geographies, and data types.
The cases illustrate the remarkable diversity of both the data being reused and the public-interest questions they seek to address. They span public health, humanitarian response, climate adaptation, environmental monitoring, disaster management, mobility, labor markets, economic measurement, agriculture, digital governance, education, and urban planning, among other domains. They also demonstrate how organizations are increasingly combining non-traditional data with traditional evidence sources, machine learning techniques, and domain expertise to produce more timely, actionable, and context-specific insights.
To provide a structured overview of this rapidly evolving field, the use cases are organized into seven broad data domains: (1) digital communication and online interaction data; (2) mobility and geolocation data; (3) health and biomedical data; (4) financial and commercial data; (5) work and labor market data; (6) in-home and Internet of Things (IoT) data; and (7) environmental, geospatial, and infrastructure data. Within each domain, examples are further grouped according to more specific data types. Each use case follows a common structure, describing the public-interest challenge being addressed, the role played by non-traditional data, and why the reuse of those data matters…(More)”
