Free Public Datasets from Socrata

Socrata, the “Social Data Network”, has created a platform for people to publish datasets for public viewing. From their site:

Opening government to new audiences and constituencies is the 21st century battle cry in societies everywhere. At the heart of this movement is open government data, readily accessible over the internet, in a form that maximizes comprehension, interactivity, participation, and sharing, delivered at a fraction of the cost of today’s data download sites. At Socrata, we call this social data discovery, and we’ve engineered a comprehensive suite of Web solutions for delivering social data discovery on government data sites around the world.

Integrating popular social features such as ratings, comments, and sharing, with a full API and RSS support, they’ve taken data from the Data.gov project and others to a new level.  Can’t wait to see some of the visualizations to arise from this.

Socrata | Making Data Social.

This story written by Randall Hand

Randall Hand is a computer graphics programmer and news junky that's been working in the field for the last 15 years. He's responsible for visualizations generated on some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, ytnef, mullion support in ParaView, and VizWorld.com.