Infochimps.org
Free Redistributable Rich Data Sets
There are many sources to find out something about everything. Until now, there’s been no good place for you to find out everything about something.
The infochimps.org community is assembling and interconnecting the world's best repository for raw data -- a sort of giant free allmanac, with tables on everything you can put in a table. Built by data nerds, used by data nerds, it's a central source for the information you need to power the projects the world needs.
The internet is a copy machine. At its most foundational level, it copies every action, every character, every thought we make while we ride upon it. In order to send a message from one corner of the internet to another, the protocols of communication demand that the whole message be copied along the way several times. IT companies make a lot of money selling equipment that facilitates this ceaseless copying. Every bit of data ever produced on any computer is copied somewhere. The digital economy is thus run on a river of copies. Unlike the mass-produced reproductions of the machine age, these copies are not just cheap, they are free.
Our digital communication network has been engineered so that copies flow with as little friction as possible. Indeed, copies flow so freely we could think of the internet as a super-distribution system, where once a copy is introduced it will continue to flow through the network forever, much like electricity in a superconductive wire. We see evidence of this in real life. Once anything that can be copied is brought into contact with internet, it will be copied, and those copies never leave. Even a dog knows you can't erase something once its flowed on the internet.
Picasa: The Google-owned photo service automatically groups photos with similar faces. Users can then more easily label the photos with the names of those who appear in them.
KEA is an algorithm for extracting keyphrases from text documents. It can be either used for free indexing or for indexing with a controlled vocabulary.
ERIC provides free access to more than 1.2 million bibliographic records of journal articles and other education-related materials and, if available, includes links to full text. ERIC is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences (IES).
SumoBrain is FREE! SumoBrain offers cross-collection searching, portfolios, alerts, and other collaboration tools, as well as bulk PDF download capabilities. Sumobrain caters to intellectual property professionals, attorneys, and users in the corporate world. While SumoBrain was conceived as a subscription service, we have decided to take the radical step of making SumoBrain completely free. As long as we can support its costs without subscription fees, it will remain free indefinitely
OpenBusiness is a platform to share and develop innovative Open Business ideas- entrepreneurial ideas which are built around openness, free services and free access. The two main aims of the project are to build an online resource of innovative business models, ideas and tools, and to publish an OpenBusiness Guidebook.
On March 9 2006 the Guardian's Technology supplement carried an article called "Give us back our crown jewels". The argument is simple: government-funded and approved agencies such as the Ordnance Survey and UK Hydrographic Office and Highways Agency are government-owned agencies; they collect data on our behalf. So why can't we get at that data as easily as we can Google Maps or the Xtides program?
Even though OS and the UK Hydrographic Office are designated as trading funds (which means that they operate as self-contained commercial entities receiving no direct tax funding), substantial parts of their income - up to 50% in the case of OS - comes from the public sector; meaning, in effect, they are part-paid by taxes. Yet they charge for that data, with onerous copyright restrictions that prevent the re-use of the data.
That restricts innovation and artificially restricts the number and variety of organisations that can offer services based on that most useful data - which our taxes have helped to collect.
Making that data available for use for free - rather as commercial companies such as Amazon and Google do with their catalog and maps data - would vastly expand the range of services available. It cannot make any sense that Google, an American organisation, is presently more popular with people aiming to create new map applications.
More questions? Why not read the frequently asked questions.