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Where's the Open Data?

Posted by Cliff on from the diamonds-in-the-rough dept.

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."

5 of 56 comments (clear)

  1. Your Tax Dollars At Work by Dr.+Bent · · Score: 5, Informative

    Right Here.

  2. NIMA and NOAA too by stanwirth · · Score: 5, Informative

    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!

  3. How 'common' do you need it? by tswinzig · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    There is, it's right here.

    (aka The Internet)

    --

    "And like that ... he's gone."
  4. here ya go by zogger · · Score: 5, Informative

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

  5. Amen by pizza_milkshake · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.