- The Center for Responsible Politics publishes contributions by individuals to political candidates in the United States.
- Many countries have data from their census available online, including the United States.
- The Geonames database has the longitude, latitude, containment, and class of named places all over the world.
- The Securities and Exchange Commission has downloadable financial data for all companies listed on U.S. stock exchanges.
- Agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency have downloadable information about environmental pollution in certain places and the facilities that produce the most pollution.
- A surprisingly useful resource is the Trademark database, which can be used to find which companies own rights to brand names, what the brand names are used to sell, and, often amusingly, all the art associated with different brands.
- Many social networks allow downloads of subsets of information, including relationships and other fields such as location.
- Nutritional information (calories, grams of fat, etc.) about almost every consumable product is available from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
- The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) publishes many databases related to genetic and medical informatics, including Genbank, Pubmed, Gene, and dbSNP.
- Many city or state health departments publish data about restaurant inspections, which is a good source of free data about which restaurants are in a city and also how clean they are.
- Agencies such as Medicare and the Food and Drug Administration have huge downloadable data sets of drug availability, costs, and usage.
- Online message boards often contain mentions of companies, products, and places, along with text that can be mined for sentiment and relationships.
You'll notice that although a lot of these sources come from totally different places, they often talk about very similar things.
With this insightful book, you'll learn from the best data practitioners in the field just how wide-ranging -- and beautiful -- working with data can be. Join 39 contributors as they explain how they developed simple and elegant solutions on projects ranging from the Mars lander to a Radiohead video.




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