Geo Data Resources
You might have recently heard about Obama’s executive order to open government data and this made me want to dedicate a post that aggregates various sources for geographical data. The US Government’s Data.gov website currently has over 200,000 datasets and I am impressed at the available formats and filtering capabilities. There are over 400 data sets on next.data.gov. The health data community has over 800 data sets and the U.S. Census Bureau has a really large collection of maps and data available to explore.
Adding to this, we have the CIA World Factbook which has a lot of relevant country information but not in an open standards format. My last post highlighted how you could use CasperJS to scrape and transform that data into CSV or JSON files. But, let’s explore non-government data sets and geo resources:
- Google Fusion Tables – search thousands of public tables from around the web
- Natural Earth – Free vector and raster map data at 1:10m, 1:50m, and 1:110m scales
- Protected Planet – Over 200,000 protected areas in KMZ, CSV, or Shapefile format
- GeoCommons – A Community Site for Open Data and Maps
- InfoChimps – Over 11,000 datasets
- koordinates – the one place for geodata
- World Health Organization – WHO Data Repository
- UN Data – data access system to UN databases
- OECD Stat Extract – data for OECD countries and selected non-member economies
- FreeBase – query or download weekly data dumps
- Many Eyes Data Sets – over 400,000 data sets from IBM
- Amazon Data Sets – Public Data Sets on AWS
- ICPSR – a ton of data sets from ICPSR
- Global Health Facts – Global Health Data
- Flickr – Flickr ShapeFiles
- OpenStreetMap – OSM Data to Download
- GeoData @ Tufts – over 10,000 geo results that you can map
- GitHub GeoJSON – over 40,000 GeoJSON files
- D3 Data Files – data files from D3 Playground on Github
- World Atlas – Explore World Geography
- Open Data by Socrata – Search & Browse Datasets and Views
- index mundi – Country statistics, charts, and maps
- NationMaster – World Statistics and Country Comparisons
- Semantic Community – Community of Data
You can find some more data resources here and here, as well as in the list below:
More:
Project Open Data
ESRI toolbox and tool(s) that export ESRI Feature Classes to open data formats
Dynamically generate RESTful APIs from static CSVs
Dynamically generate RESTful APIs from the contents of a database table
Country Data using Wolfram Alpha
Latitude and Longitude codes of US Cities
Geography on Reddit
DataHub
Data JSON Gist Results
USGS ecosystems data
Rankings of Countries
ArcGIS Data Search
Google Earth Forums
DBpedia for Wikipedia data
Feedity – create RSS feed from any website
Open NASA Project
Library of Congress Geography and Map Reading Room
FlowingData – Data Visualization, Infographics, and Statistics
The Guardian Data Blog
Mapping and Geo APIs
GADM database of Global Administrative Areas
OpenStreetMap Potential Datasources
Free Spatial Data from DIVA GIS
Cloudmade Downloads
