All Questions

I'd like to be able to query to discover what's on the ballot - from local measures to Presidential elections. Is there a source that combines all of this data? Or is there a standard that's ...

My understanding is that the MIT license allows sublicensing while the BSD license does not, meaning that license restrictions can be added to things like mashups and not to the original data as a ...

Is there a database of fictional characters from novels, films, dramas etc., grouped by genre? The most important entries for me are the name, nationality (real or fictional), title of the novel/film/...

Is there a database of the ships that were built until now, containing the size, weight, displacement, cost, year of built, and optionally the amount of used materials? It does not need to contain ...

Are there any open complete and downloadable usenet archives? I don't expect binaries to be included, only the text messages? If the complete archive is not available, than at least a partial archive ...

I'm looking for open-source or publicly-available terrain data, for instance heightmaps or DEMs -- ideally GeoTIFFS by way of an easy-to-use API. For instance: you pass a pair of lat/longs and maybe a ...

Is there some centralized or streamlined source of data release schedules for major U.S. government agencies? Something that combines sources such as the BLS Schedule of Data Release, ACS Data Release ...

In reviewing the data from geonames, I discovered in my spot check that Indonesia is missing. A bit of time with Google revealed a few places where I could buy data sets but nothing open. Anywhere ...

Are there any open (and preferably inter/multinational, not just US) databases on membership to boards of directors and leaders of government agencies? For instance, Little Sis has mostly US data (...

Maybe there is no way to request a specific file type but what is the best way to request a file (paper or digital) that can be converted easiestly?

Certain U.S. federal grant applications require the use of "recent" data, e.g. data used to support the application should come from recent (i.e. within the past 5 years) published source Is ...

I'm seeking corpora of American English SMS (<=160 characters) text messages. What corpora are available?

What is average cost/effort to launch CKAN instance and what are operational expenses to maintain it going forward? (Assuming small size government with limited IT resources)

We publish most of our machine-readable open data in CSV format. What are best practices and/or standards to publish data dictionaries (e.g. definitions of columns in CSV files including human-...

I can already find data about Brazilian cities/states (e.g. population, localization, crime rates etc...), on some websites such as the government's open data portal and census data (which ...

Assume that a person moves from one address to another. They update their driver's license, which means the DMV has the correct address. However the Town Clerk has the previous address. Both the DMV ...

The Zooniverse team has had amazing success with the OldWeather project to crowdsource coding of old ships logs to extract climate data. And I believe Sunlight did some crowdsourcing (with Mechanical ...

Is there a a standard source for finding out what businesses (with brick and mortar locations) exist in a geographical area (particularly in the U.S.)? This doesn't necessarily have to be a ...

How do I merge similar datasets, not just once but on an ongoing basis? This seems like a reasonably common problem so I'd be interested if there is a tool out there aimed at this problem, as a guided ...

What's the best practice of extracting tables from a large number of PDF, which may be formatted differently? For example, I have a series of PDFs like this one, and I would like to extract the ...

While OpenStreetMap is rather good for cartographic information (and rendered maps) in urban areas of France, it is rather unsatisfactory in rural areas (except in the area where I live, where I ...

I've run into a number of use cases where I need to normalize company names in a database before running automated and manual matching. We've usually ended up writing a specific script with endless ...

I would like to have an open data source on inflation, rupee value and sensex index data over period of 10 years of India.

Disasters happens, in this situations information is everything. Is there any information system that works worldwide and would: Notify the possible victims that the something is coming (in cases it ...

Wikidata is a new Wikimedia project: It centralizes access to and management of structured data, such as interwiki references and statistical information. This data would be of enormous interest ...

Data for NOAA meteorological satellites can be downloaded through the NOAA CLASS archive. Where, if anywhere, can I download data for the Chinese FY-3* meteorological satellites?

I am looking for historical foreign exchange (forex) data for financial reporting purposes. For example, I would like to distribute a data source that could be used for determining forex gains and ...

I would like to know if a repository of all known ISBN exists; either a worldwide database, or per country. If there is no such downloadable database, among all the available API's for querying ...

Since the Harvard Business Review claimed that Data Scientist is The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century, graph analysis and big data are becoming very popular topics at my university. I'm familiar with ...

I'm looking to parse a large number of lines of repetitive but unstructured data. This is a task that happens at least once every project, in my experience, so I'm looking for a tool to transform ...

When I buy a computer, besides the price, one of the most important characteristics is the processor. CPU DB is a website that aims to list cpus hardware specifications. Where can I get similar data ...

I have a personal database of cartographic maps that I used for many purposes, mostly planning campings and other outside adventures. I'd like to have similar data about Brazil.

How can one evaluate a government entity's progress in making their data open? I've read the 8 Principles of Open Government Data, but I'd like to know if there are tools to specifically grade an ...

Wikipedia is a significant source of data. Data from Wikipedia may be available in various formats via other servers (e.g., SPARQL end point). For a task of extracting all pairs of "ATC code" - "...

Is there an open database that would contained the historical prices of the most popular products in U.S.? At best with the product classification, so that it would be possible to make analysis, how ...

Is there a database containing the list of the most popular first names and surnames (with occurrence count, or at least sorted by popularity) for many nations/countries? I need such data for the ...

Is there open database with English words with grammatical classification? I mean the list of words, with the information, which part of speech this word is (f.e. verb, noun, pronoun etc.).

Are there drawbacks to FOIAing (Freedom of Information Act, either federally or equivalent state/local laws) an agency? For example, can it lead to an adversarial relationship?

Is there downloadable and freely available database with administrative units of Germany (lands, cities, and if available, streets with zip codes)? In many countries such databases are provided ...

The FCC's developers page happens to have a sidebar linking to many other US government agencies' developers pages, APIs, etc. It's a handy list, but I assume the FCC hosts it only out of the goodness ...

I am quite new to open data. I see a lot of people looking for machine-readable data, but to start, I am wondering which tool I can use to start playing with some dataset. I am particularly looking ...

I've heard a few times that for data one should use rather CC0 (Creative Commons - Public Domain Dedication) license than CC-BY (Creative Commons - Attribution). What is the reason for that? (As ...

If some site claims to offer a definitive data source, how can I trust that it is not purposely biased? Even excluding elaborate conspiracies, how could I know that it isn't just a big hoax? It ...

Data.gov has a lot of datasets, and a super-majority of them are mapping. Is there a way to generate a list of all datasets other than geodata?

As an example, I'm very interested in working with rulemaking data from the FCC. Because the FCC is an independent agency, I've heard that its publishing requirements are different from non-...

I've seen they can be purchased from Guidestar, but wondered if there was an freely available open data source.

What data is used to calculate the CPI (Consumer Price Index) and if it is open, where can I find it?

Are there any medical or clinical data sources that have de-identified patient data (name, date of birth, sex) as well as basic physical parameters such as weight, or height? I'm specifically ...

A few years ago, Sunlight Foundation advocated for the Public Online Information Act (POIA). Do you know of any city that has adopted such a law or statue? In the age of the Internet, government is ...

Are there any websites that have basic City and County information for the U.S.?