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Index › Programming Questions & Help › Programs › Fun sources of data for visualizations
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Fun sources of data for visualizations? (Read 673 times)
ewjordan
Fun sources of data for visualizations?
May 13th, 2008, 11:52am  
One thing you can never get enough of if you're doing visualizations is data - doesn't matter what, the more, the better!  I wanted to start this thread to pass around any ideas that anyone has about where to get large amounts of the good stuff...

I'll start it off with the obvious - there is tons of free stock data online:

- http://finance.yahoo.com - lets you download daily historical stock data for pretty much any stock listed
- http://www.gummy-stuff.org/Yahoo-data.htm - Explains how to get detailed quotes in CSV format from Yahoo
- http://www.dukascopy.com/swiss/english/data_feed/csv_data_export/ - free downloads of some intraday stock data
- http://kumo.swcp.com/stocks/#historical%20data - 1 year of data for every member of the S&P 500


Also, US government data is easy to come by:

- http://www.usa.gov/Topics/Reference_Shelf/Data.shtml - Massive linkdump of US government data - the stuff in here could keep you busy for several lifetimes
- https://www.federalreserve.gov/datadownload/ - The Federal Reserve maintains a good amount of data relating to all things financial and American
- http://www.census.gov/ - not the easiest site to find what you're looking for at, but there's a lot of stuff there (including the TIGER dataset at http://www.census.gov/geo/www/tiger/ that Ben used in All Streets)
- http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/catalogs/ - earthquake data
- http://www.fec.gov/disclosure.shtml - Federal Elections Commission data

Anyone have other sources they've found useful?  I guess it's clear my focus has tended towards the financial, but I'm sure there is a lot of other interesting stuff out there, too.
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chazmatazz
Re: Fun sources of data for visualizations?
Reply #1 - Jun 3rd, 2008, 12:38am  
I can't resist posting since this is something I'm interested in.

There's a lot of environmental data out there. In all sorts of fun formats that will keep you up all night decoding.

http://www.epa.gov/epahome/abcdata.htm
USA data. I particularly like (in order from easiest to parse to hardest):

http://www.epa.gov/enviro/geo_data.html
Superfund sites, TRI sites, etc. Just the locations (Lat/Lon) and what kind of site it is. XML format.

http://www.epa.gov/cleanenergy/energy-resources/egrid/index.html - Excel format emissions data for US powerplants, with Latitude / Longitude.

http://www.epa.gov/air/data/index.html - Air quality data. 1Gb+ MS Access databases. Fun. (I haven't played with this data yet.)

See also
http://www.eyebeam.org/learning/ecovis.php
for a list of data sources.

There's a set of climate prediction data at
http://www.northeastclimateimpacts.org/
It looks interesting.
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