Purpose

I am trying to keep a list of data sets available to the public for data professionals to download and use. These are good for learning analysis, reporting, visualizations or more and I'd encourage you to spend time with these sets.

Note that all of these sources have free data, but some may charge for specific data sets.

If you have one you'd like listed, send me a note or leave a comment in the discussion. If you write about how to download or manipulate these sets, let me know, or submit an article here on the site.

Public Data Sets

These are the sets and I've tried to put them in some sort of order. If you have comments or suggestions, let me know:

Government Data

• Data.gov - The main site for much US government data available online. A portal to other places.
• Data.gov.uk - The UK version of government open data.
• http://www.data.gc.ca/ - Canadian government data portal
• US Census Bureau - Data from US Census actions
• European Union Data Portal - Variety of data from the EU
• http://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/our-work/our-research/electoral-data - UK Electorial Commission

Sports

For those of you interested in sports

• http://www.seanlahman.com/baseball-archive/statistics/ - Sean Lahman's baseball database.
• http://baseballguru.com/bbdata1.html - Baseball guru's datasets
• stats.nba.com - Everything you could want, including spatial data.
• http://www.pro-football-reference.com/ - Lots of downloadable files for you to view.
• http://knoema.com/atlas/topics/Cricket/datasets - Cricket data
• https://github.com/jalapic/engsoccerdata - A project with lots of English data and sources
• http://www.opensourcesports.com/hockey/ - NHL and early league stats
• http://www.hockeyabstract.com/testimonials - Some hockey stats from recent years.

Health Data

We are all getting older and health information is becoming more and more important to track and analyze for the world.

• http://www.who.int/en/ - World Health Organization data
• https://www.healthdata.gov/ - US health data on claims and disease
• http://www.hscic.gov.uk/home - NHS health data from the UK
• http://aws.amazon.com/datasets/human-microbiome-project/ - Human microbiome project
• http://www.broadinstitute.org/cgi-bin/cancer/datasets.cgi - BROAD Institute cancer related datasets
• http://www.unicef.org/statistics/ - UNICEF data on women and children
• http://aws.amazon.com/datasets/1000-genomes-project/ - 1000 Genomes project
• http://download.cms.gov/nppes/NPI_Files.html - Center for Medicate and Medicaid services

Weather

Some weather sources you can work with.

• http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access/quick-links#loc-clim - Nathional Climactic Data Center
• http://aws.amazon.com/datasets/ccafs-climate-data/ - Climate data from CCAFS

Space

• http://aws.amazon.com/datasets/nasa-nex/ - Nasa Nex

Miscellaneous and General Facts

Misc sources. Let me know if you want these moved elsewhere.

• http://data.worldbank.org/ - World Bank data on a variety of topics
• https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/ - The CIA Factbook about the world.
• http://aws.amazon.com/datasets/6468931156960467 - Million Song Dataset
• http://www.pewinternet.org/datasets/ - PEW Research Center data on America life
• http://aws.amazon.com/datasets/common-crawl-corpus/ - Common Crawl Corpus. Lots of web pages
• http://aws.amazon.com/datasets/material-safety-data-sheets/ - Material Safety Data Sheets.
• https://www.nationalnanpa.com/reports/reports_cocodes.html - National telephony data for the US.

Spatial Datasets

• http://www.census.gov/geo/maps-data/data/tiger-line.html?eml=gd&utm_medium=email&utm_source=govdelivery - US Shapefiles.
• http://mcdc2.missouri.edu/websas/geocorr2k.html - Geographic data for 2000 census in the US

Dataset Lists

I know I can't keep up here, so I'm linking to a few places that do try to manage lists of data sets.

• KDNuggets list of free datasets - http://www.kdnuggets.com/2011/02/free-public-datasets.html
• Public Data Sets at AWS - https://aws.amazon.com/public-data-sets/
• Data Science Central links - http://www.datasciencecentral.com/group/data-science-apprenticeship/forum/topics/update-about-our-data-science-apprenticeship

As mentioned, let me know if I've missed anything big.