What does ''Data as a Service (DaaS)" means?

Wikipedia says Data as a Service, or DaaS is based on the concept that the product, data in this case, can be provided on demand to the user regardless of geographic or organizational separation of provider and consumer. My question is, i开发者_开发知识库n what this definition differs from the Internet? Can you provide some practical examples and benefits of using this paradigm? Thanks.

An example would be purchasing access rights to geolocated databases of a provider and make lookups ad-hoc
Such a service can be charged for by amount of requested data or by subscription. The benefit of such a service is eliminating the need to collect, process and store the data.

To contrast such a service to the internet - the internet is not an acces right to certain data, but borders are blurry as always

They refer to data sets that can be queried dynamically, licensed properly, etc.

Microsoft is building a 'DataMarket' http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/marketplace/ which is a 'Data as a Service' product.

Amazon has another http://aws.amazon.com/publicdatasets/

Google bought http://www.freebase.com/ sometime ago.