Where's the Open Data?

blamanj asks: "There's a lot of open-source code around, and generally, it's quite easy to find. Finding open source data, on the other hand, can be quite a pain. Why isn't there a common reponsitory for public domain data sets? I'm thinking of things like lists of world cities, dictionaries of stemmed words, population data, etc., etc."

Comments

It should be clearly labeled

[jki]

There's a lot of open-source code around, and generally, it's quite easy to find. Finding open source data, on the other hand, can be quite a pain

When you go to Google to find software to fill some specific need, you already know quite clearly how to search. The problem with finding "open data" is that there currently is not any commonly used clear label on such texts, research and articles. I tend to mention that the content is released under the GNU Free Documentation License or FDL when I want to release something to be freely utlized by anyone. One such case is for example the Amazon Discoveries series. Not that it would be any useful for anyone :) This problem is a bit related to the problem of releasing your idea or concept under such license - there does not seem any clear practise how to go on about this :: what to do if your idea might be unique but you do not want to patent it. We have that exact problem with for example the Openchallenge concept submissions. Any ideas on what practises to use in that case would help us out.

not an easily distributed task

[joe094287523459087]

it costs more money to get data than to make code.

Re:How 'common' do you need it?

[mabinogi]

> Unfortunately, most of the Ask Slashdot's are so lame they can be answered with a simple google search.

But someone submitting a question to Ask Slashdot doesn't want a bunch of links from Google, they want opinions...opinions from real people that may or may not (most likely) know what they're talking about.
They want discussion.....you cant get that by searching on google...