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

Your Tax Dollars At Work

[Dr. Bent]

Right Here.

Soon you'll be able to try...

[damien_kane]

MIT's SuperArchive

Grabbe the link off of rootprompt in case any of you care

NIMA and NOAA too

[stanwirth]

NOAA provides Bathymetry data and electronic navigation charts (vectorized) and NIMA (that's right, .mil, -- NIMA used to be the Defense Mapping Agency provides city lists and populations for all the countries in the world, as well as DEMs (digital elevation models--i.e. gridded topography). The National Atlas project provides boundaries of federal lands, outlines of states, locations of major cities, stuff like that.

ENJOY!

How 'common' do you need it?

[tswinzig]

Why isn't there a common reponsitory for public domain data sets?

There is, it's right here.

(aka The Internet)

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...

here ya go

[zogger]

--here's a great site. refdesk.com. Matt Drudge's father runs this site,AFAIK, a boatload of data links.

Amen

[pizza_milkshake]

That kind of data is out there if you want it, but it isn't always in the format you want it and sometimes it's hard to find (less hard with google). I started a site for this kind of data at www.tonsoflists.com, which contains data in MySQL tables that you can format into different kinds of sets,orderings, formats, etc. Just did it for fun, but haven't gotten any feedback.

Where's the financial data??

[grammar nazi]

Screw all of the other data mentioned above! I want to run pricing models on historic financial data... e.g. intraday option prices and vols, dividend schedules 30 years back, intraday stock prices for way back.

This is stuff you can't download for free from Yahoo, CBOE, or other places.

If I can just get access to this data, then I will make enough money to purchase the other data.

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.

Timelines and the 'Necessary Web'

[RobotWisdom]

I think you'd lose more than you'd gain if you tried to centralise this process-- it's hard enough to keep a local webpage up-to-date.

I agree in theory that we need a Semantic Web where content is easier to find, but I don't think XML-etc can really help. [rant]

My current theory is that individuals need to build the 'Necessary Web' which consists, like an encyclopedia, of a page for each topic (or many pages by different authors, on their own websites). Four special traits make a page qualify as 'Necessary':

-- an attempt to be FAQ-like, and briefly cover all the important subtopics on a single page.

-- an attempt to sort thru and link all the best web-resources on the topic. (By reducing the linktext to one- or two-word [text buttons] you can fit hundreds of links into a useful page.)

-- a timeline, to present the most possible data in the neatest possible way. [theory]

-- The Open Web Content License to encourage others to recycle-and-update your content, requiring only that they clearly link your page as one of the original sources.

Most recent example of this format: Linux/Unix (timeline w/100s of links)

I believe that once a critical mass of authors adopt this format, taking on the most useful topics, there will be a rapid shift from the current search-frustrations to something very much like the Semantic-Web ideal, without even requiring any fancier technology than simple HTML.