The free big data sources you should know

I always make the point that data is everywhere – and that a lot
of it is free. Companies don’t necessarily have to build their own
massive data repositories before starting with big data analytics.
The moves by companies and governments to put large amounts
of information into the public domain have made large volumes
of data accessible to everyone.
Any company, from big blue chip corporations to the tiniest
start-up can now leverage more data than ever before. Many of
my clients ask me for the top data sources they could use in
their big data endeavour and here’s my rundown of some of the
best free big data sources available today.
Data.gov
The US Government pledged last year to make all government
data available freely online. This site is the first stage and acts
as a portal to all sorts of amazing information on everything
from climate to crime. To check it out, click here.
US Census Bureau
A wealth of information on the lives of US citizens covering
population data, geographic data and education. To check it out,
click here. To check it out, click here.
European Union Open Data Portal
As the above, but based on data from European Union
institutions. To check it out, click here .
Data.gov.uk
Data from the UK Government, including the British National
Bibliography – metadata on all UK books and publications since
1950. To check it out, click here .
The CIA World Factbook
Information on history, population, economy, government,
infrastructure and military of 267 countries. To check it out, click
here .
Healthdata.gov
125 years of US healthcare data including claim-level Medicare
data, epidemiology and population statistics. To check it out,
click here .
NHS Health and Social Care Information Centre
Health data sets from the UK National Health Service. To check
it out, click here .
Amazon Web Services public datasets
Huge resource of public data, including the 1000 Genome
Project, an attempt to build the most comprehensive database of
human genetic information and NASA’s database of satellite
imagery of Earth. To check it out, click here .
Facebook Graph
Although much of the information on users’ Facebook profile is
private, a lot isn’t – Facebook provide the Graph API as a way of
querying the huge amount of information that its users are happy
to share with the world (or can’t hide because they haven’t
worked out how the privacy settings work). To check it out, click
here .
Gapminder
Compilation of data from sources including the World Health
Organization and World Bank covering economic, medical and
social statistics from around the world. To check it out, click
here .
Google Trends
Statistics on search volume (as a proportion of total search) for
any given term, since 2004. To check it out, click here .
Google Finance
40 years’ worth of stock market data, updated in real time. To
check it out, click here.
Google Books Ngrams
Search and analyze the full text of any of the millions of books
digitised as part of the Google Books project. To check it out,
click here.
National Climatic Data Center
Huge collection of environmental, meteorological and climate
data sets from the US National Climatic Data Center. The world’s
largest archive of weather data. To check it out, click here .
DBPedia
Wikipedia is comprised of millions of pieces of data, structured
and unstructured on every subject under the sun. DBPedia is an
ambitious project to catalogue and create a public, freely
distributable database allowing anyone to analyze this data. To
check it out, click here .
Topsy
Free, comprehensive social media data is hard to come by –
after all their data is what generates profits for the big players
(Facebook, Twitter etc) so they don’t want to give it away.
However Topsy provides a searchable database of public tweets
going back to 2006 as well as several tools to analyze the
conversations. To check it out, click here .
Likebutton
Mines Facebook’s public data – globally and from your own
network – to give an overview of what people “Like” at the
moment. To check it out, click here .
New York Times
Searchable, indexed archive of news articles going back to 1851.
To check it out, click here .
Freebase
A community-compiled database of structured data about
people, places and things, with over 45 million entries. To check
it out, click here .
Million Song Data Set
Metadata on over a million songs and pieces of music. Part of
Amazon Web Services.