Sources and Meta-Sources of Open Data: Kirk Bourne on Open Data Repositories

The following is re-posed from Kirk Bourne’s Data Science Central blog. Access the original posting here.

Open data repositories are valuable for many reasons, including:

(1) they provide a source of insight and transparency into the domains and organizations that are represented by the data sets;

(2) they enable value creation across a variety of domains, using the data as the “fuel” for innovation, government transformation, new ideas, and new businesses;

(3) they offer a rich variety of data sets for data scientists to sharpen their data mining, knowledge discovery, and machine learning modeling skills; and

(4) they allow many more eyes to look at the data and thereby to see things that might have been missed by the creators and original users of the data.

Here are some sources and meta-sources of open data:

• http://data.gov
• http://www.census.gov/data.html
• http://www.healthdata.gov/
• http://www.socrata.com/resources/
• https://www.quandl.com/
• http://data.gov.uk/
• http://open-data.europa.eu/en/data/
• http://index.okfn.org/dataset/
• http://ohiotreasurer.gov/transparency/Ohios-Online-Checkbook
• http://www.gapminder.org/data/
• http://aws.amazon.com/datasets
• http://www.google.com/publicdata/directory
• http://datacatalog.worldbank.org/
• https://www.kaggle.com/competitions
• http://www.kdnuggets.com/datasets/index.html
• http://www.crowdflower.com/data-for-everyone
• https://datafloq.com/public-data/
• http://www.data-mania.com/blog/19-excellent-free-open-data-sources-...
• http://www.datasciencecentral.com/group/data-science-apprenticeship...
• https://mran.revolutionanalytics.com/documents/data/
• http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/
• https://kdd.ics.uci.edu/
• http://wiki.dbpedia.org/
• http://blog.visual.ly/data-sources/
• https://www.crowdanalytix.com/dataX
• http://blog.bigml.com/2013/02/28/data-data-data-thousands-of-public...
• http://people.stern.nyu.edu/adamodar/New_Home_Page/data.html
• http://www.smartdatacollective.com/bernardmarr/235366/big-data-20-f...
• http://www.sisense.com/blog/free-data-sources-upgrade-business-deci...
• https://sites.google.com/site/braumoellerosu/ug-stats-resource-page
• http://readwrite.com/2008/04/09/where_to_find_open_data_on_the

Kirk Borne is a data scientist and an astrophysicist. He is Principal Data Scientist in the Strategic Innovation Group at Booz-Allen Hamilton since 2015. He was Professor of Astrophysics and Computational Science in the George Mason University (GMU) School of Physics, Astronomy, and Computational Sciences during 2003-2015. He served as undergraduate advisor for the GMU Data Science program and graduate advisor to students in the Computational Science and Informatics PhD program. Prior to that, he spent nearly 20 years supporting NASA projects, including NASA's Hubble Space Telescope as Data Archive Project Scientist, NASA's Astronomy Data Center, and NASA's Space Science Data Operations Office. He has extensive experience in large scientific databases and information systems, including expertise in scientific data mining. He was a contributor to the design and development of the new Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), for which he contributed in the areas of science data management, informatics and statistical science research, galaxies research, and education and public outreach.

Follow Kirk Borne on Twitter @KirkDBorne.