About a month ago I put some initial reactions to the Thomson Reuters Data Citation Index into a public note. I received some requests to do a more formal version of the same and have finally been able to do so at http://z.umn.edu/trdci. It’s a Google Doc that should be public and should allow comments. Our trial period ended in early December and it may be that some of the problems I describe have since been resolved.
The Geospatial Data Preservation Resource Center gathers freely available web-based resources about the preservation of geospatial information. A variety of selected resources are being added, including reports, presentations, standards, and information about tools for preparing geospatial assets for long-term access and use. The resources are indexed to enable searching of titles and are categorized to facilitate discovery by choosing among topics, resource types, or both. The Geospatial Data Preservation Resource Center is a project of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP), which is working with a national network of partners on a strategy for preserving digital information for use in the future.
Recently Kenya launched Kenya Open Data, a portal to national and sub-national data by and/or about the nation of Kenya. The site runs on a tool called Socrata boasts a host of really nice features including: rss for catalog & new visualizations rss for specific datasets row-by-row links to the source data in visualization screens (link applies to items below was well) widgets for embedding on websites sort/hide columns; aggregation/disaggregation on data views sharing of specific views via social media & email a sign in option for data uploads The site also contains links to other data platforms such as Google Public Data Explorer.
Thanks to Lynda Kellam at the Dataland Blog for highlighting the United States Department of Housing & Urban Development (HUD) Data Set Reference Guides. HUD has a dense website and posts a lot of data. These two tables help you figure out which ones are most relevant for which areas of research. Unfortunately, neither has a usefully descriptive name or clear pattern of inclusion. The second guide is much shorter and includes sets like the CBO Appropriations and Fair Housing Cases as opposed to the American Housing Survey and State of the Cities listed on the first guide.
The Displaced New Orleans Residents Pilot Study (DNORPS) is a brand new dataset added to the ICPSR-hosted website “Data Sharing for Demographic Research”. Access appears to be available to all users, not just ICPSR member institutions. The Displaced New Orleans study was a 2006 pilot study “designed to examine the current location, well-being, and plans of people who lived in the city of New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina struck on August 29, 2005.
Great News Everyone! The Government of Canada has just debuted a new portal to their data at the Open Data Pilot Project. The pilot has launched with 782 general datasets (e.g. not geospatial) and over 260,000 geospatial datasets. The three agencies contributing the largest number of datasets as of launch are Department of Finance Canada (258), Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (226), and Statistics Canada (120). The data gathered here is freely available to all users and comes with an apparently very broad user license.
The World Bank has just launched a new Data website that is densely packed with newly free data and features for using the data which are appropriate to all levels of users. Users may browse by country, topic, indicator or listing in the data catalog. The World Bank says that access is now freely available for over 2000 indicators from 1960-present. In comparison, the most recent version of World Development Indicators, a licensed version of their data sold to academic libraries, contained just over 900 indicators.
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