Infochimps.org - A Free Almanac of Open Datasets
April 4, 2008 7:25 AM
Infochimps.org - A Free Almanac of Open Datasets
Exploring rich data is fun — but finding it, formatting it, and tagging it with metadata is drudge work barely fit for a trained chimp. And if you've gathered or cleaned up a large dataset and want to share it, you face two troubling prospects: a) no one will find it, or b) everyone will find it.
Infochimps.org (FAQ) is a project to assemble and interconnect the world's best repository for raw data -- a sort of giant free almanac, with tables on everything you could put in a table. Just as wikipedia will help you find out something about everything, infochimps.org will help you find out everything about something. 30 years of daily stock prices? Box scores for every major-league baseball game? Every wikipedia infobox, each infobox type in its own table? 50 years of global hourly weather data? All the tables from the US Census Statistical Abstract? Those and many other datasets large and small -- and you get them to play with, in whole, on your machine: no sandbox or restrictions. We've just recently launched: so some of the more exciting datasets aren't live yet, and there's a bunch of features still being added. There's plenty of good stuff for people to enjoy there already, though, and everything we build is and will remain free and open, so check it out. If you're interested in contributing data, or in helping to grow this project, please contact us.
Exploring rich data is fun — but finding it, formatting it, and tagging it with metadata is drudge work barely fit for a trained chimp. And if you've gathered or cleaned up a large dataset and want to share it, you face two troubling prospects: a) no one will find it, or b) everyone will find it.
Infochimps.org (FAQ) is a project to assemble and interconnect the world's best repository for raw data -- a sort of giant free almanac, with tables on everything you could put in a table. Just as wikipedia will help you find out something about everything, infochimps.org will help you find out everything about something. 30 years of daily stock prices? Box scores for every major-league baseball game? Every wikipedia infobox, each infobox type in its own table? 50 years of global hourly weather data? All the tables from the US Census Statistical Abstract? Those and many other datasets large and small -- and you get them to play with, in whole, on your machine: no sandbox or restrictions. We've just recently launched: so some of the more exciting datasets aren't live yet, and there's a bunch of features still being added. There's plenty of good stuff for people to enjoy there already, though, and everything we build is and will remain free and open, so check it out. If you're interested in contributing data, or in helping to grow this project, please contact us.
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