Free Big Data Sources
From our client work as well as from out teaching at Macromedia University Munich we know the value of free big data sources. They can be used to gain further insight from external data such as weather data. Thereby business efficiency can be hugely increased. Without having to pay for expensive data. Another possible usage of the data available for free is in our project work with students. In this way they are able to base their projects on real big data without having to pay for it.
That’s why we decided to present to you a brief overview of available free big data sources:
Government Data
U.S. Government
The U.S. Government provides data about several sections: agriculture, finance, business.
U.S. Census
http://www.census.gov/data.html
The U.S. census data on population, detailed down to block level.
U.K. Government
The government of the United Kingdom makes data for economics, finance, health and agriculture publicly available.
E.U. Government
Eurostat is the statistic organisation of the European Union. They provide data covering census data, business data, migration data, economy, agriculture and health.
German Government
https://www-genesis.destatis.de
The german statistic organisation Statistisches Bundesamt offers datasets for economics, population, education and finance.
Data Collections
Amazon
http://aws.amazon.com/datasets/
Amazon provides data sets for free although computing power on their EWS platform is charged. Data available includes satellite imagery (updated daily), climate data, the million song collection of 28 music datasets, social media data, genomes data from the Human Genome Project and many more.
Kaggle
https://www.kaggle.com/datasets
Kaggle is a website covering a wide variety of topics related to data science. The offered datasets are for free and include soccer data, 5000 movies data set, US election data and many more.
Microsoft Azure
https://datamarket.azure.com/browse/data
Some of the data available at Azure is for free, some is charged. This link guides you to the list of available sets.
Science Data
CERN
http://opendata.cern.ch/?ln=en
The European Organisation for Partical Physics CERN provides data on numerous of the science projects and experiments. E.g. for their Large Hadron Collider.
Economic Data
World Bank
The World Bank provides economic, development and financial data for nearly every country/region in the world.
Bank of England
http://www.bankofengland.co.uk
A huge range of banking, monetary and financial statistics in the Statistical Interactive Database is offered by the Bank of England.
OECD Data
http://www.oecd.org/statistics/
The OECD provides national Accounts, Finance, Agriculture, Development, International Trade, Labour, Prices, Public Management and Short-term Economic Statistics. This data is available for all 30 members.
Geographic Data
Open Street Map
Open Sreet Map is a open source project of indiviuals all over the world collection, processing and offering geographical data for free.
Summary
All of those many big data sources present great opportunities to enrich you companies database, perform new business cases or run “small” big data cases yourself.
We offer the following services regarding to all data sources that are presented in this blog post:
- Data Source Identification
- Business Case Development
- Proof of Concept
- Data Enrichment
- Implementation of Databases
- Consulting
Please feel free to contact us regarding any type of data source related questions.
