October 18, 2001

12:22 PM

It really is amazing what kinds of cool, free, raw data you can get from the web (that other folks would charge you good money for), here are a few I've come across.

Weather, from the good folks at the NOAA/NWS
Geographic locations of zipcodes amongst other things from those pesky buggers at the US Census Office
Want reverse phone lookup data ? NANPA has the skinny.

So what other cool data feeds have people found out there ?
posted by zeoslap (19 comments total)

<flickering moment of self doubt>and i am right in thinking raw data feeds are cool right.... course i am </flickering moment of self doub>
posted by zeoslap at 12:30 PM on October 18, 2001

I go to m-w.com at least once every few hours.
posted by Shadowkeeper at 12:33 PM on October 18, 2001

I was thinking more in the vein of raw data, i.e where would you be able to download the data that m-w uses.. although m-w is cool, I even configured IE so I can right click on any word and look it up on m-w, v.cool :)
posted by zeoslap at 12:39 PM on October 18, 2001

you can get free clip art off m-w :)
posted by kliuless at 12:46 PM on October 18, 2001

and i am right in thinking raw data feeds are cool right

You most certainly are. Raw data is good stuff.

What I really want right now, though, is a good system for extracting data from formatted web pages.
posted by moss at 12:46 PM on October 18, 2001

This.
posted by jaek at 12:49 PM on October 18, 2001

If I was interested in reverse lookup, why wouldn't I just do it?
posted by NortonDC at 12:50 PM on October 18, 2001

Well you could just do it, in fact you can do it from the nanpa site too, but the point is with the raw unadulterated data you can do whatever you want with it i.e write your own uber lookup thingie.. and that CHP site is sweet :)
posted by zeoslap at 1:14 PM on October 18, 2001

US census has a ton of data to work with. Another good source is ESRI. Esri tries to push their wares, but you can find good data there as well.
Lastly, many Secretaries of State have detailed election results posted for the whole state.

With the above three data feeds, you can come up with some interesting applications.
posted by Witold at 1:58 PM on October 18, 2001

If you're a stats junkie then you might want locate your fridge nearer the computer before going here.
posted by Octaviuz at 3:23 PM on October 18, 2001

bulk.resource.org provides copies of selected U.S. government archives, such as the SEC's EDGAR database (in XML), trademark, copyright and 17 years of patent data (needless to say a hot topic these days with RAND and the W3C).
posted by webchick at 3:31 PM on October 18, 2001

zeoslap, I share your lust for raw data (especially real time data), and I kind of like these sites:

Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center

World Earthquake Data (Real Time)

Acid Rain Hourly Emissions Data

For non-real time data, here are some of interest:

Centers for Disease Control Weekly National Morbidity and Mortality Report

Track And Field Stats

Big Site O' Gov't Economic Stats
posted by fold_and_mutilate at 3:59 PM on October 18, 2001

I used to think "hey, man, yahoo gives you all the free raw financial data you want, whereas someone like bridge or factset would charge you out the ass for it." I wanted to use it for a project I was doing for school. Ended up writing all this code to get it, parse it, smooth it, and pack it away, and it took forever, still doesn't work that great, and is remarkably resource intensive to do. Still neat, though.
posted by jeb at 5:31 PM on October 18, 2001

If you're a stats junkie then you might want locate your fridge nearer the computer before going here.

Stats junkies don't need to eat. They're within a standard deviation of transcendence.

Crop Nutrient Tool
Meteograms!
Energy Information Administration
Where is the Porcupine Caribou Herd?

And most importantly . . .
Canadian Ice Service: Know where your icebergs are!
(The US Coast Guard Ice Patrol is down for security reasons.)
posted by iceberg273 at 6:01 PM on October 18, 2001

yeah, yahoo is cool, if you use a url of the form http://finance.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv?s=tivo&f=sl1d1t1c1ohgv&e=.csv you get it in a nice csv format (I think you can get it xml too) which is slick, what would be cool is access to the FAA servers that the FlightTracker folks use..... Couldn't find it though...
posted by zeoslap at 6:06 PM on October 18, 2001

On the other hand, you can't get updates on the status of your neighborhood power plant anymore. Which is not particularly surprising.

So the Ice Patrol and the Nuclear Regulatory Commision are offline and reanalyzing what data they give away. Is anything else AWOL?
posted by iceberg273 at 6:15 PM on October 18, 2001

My girlfriend is a high school teacher, and she asked me if I couldn't find her recent stats on income by education for her kids, which is how I stumbled on the nerdishly dreamy Bureau of Labor Statistics website. Consumer and Producer price index at a glance? Ocupational outlook handbooks? Wow.
posted by Gilbert at 9:11 PM on October 18, 2001

Elevation data every half-minute of arc: latitude and longitude.
posted by anewc2 at 4:30 PM on October 19, 2001