Big data is not the prerogative of only the privileged and moneyed few, there are some sources that anyone with a laptop and internet connection can get access to – free of cost. Several companies and government organizations make their data public, helping firms and individuals leverage more and more data.
Here are five of the best and biggest big data sourÎs you can use without shelling out a penny:
CIA World Factbook
This information resource is primarily created for the decision makers of the US and is coordinated across the US Intelligence Community. It assembles information on 267 world entities, which covers each country, dependency, and geographic entity of the world, along domains such as history, geography, government, economy, people, energy, and transnational issues. The website is partially updated on a weekly basis. It is legal to redistribute information from the website under the US law as the resource lies in the public domain.
Amazon Web Services
In 2006, Amazon launched an online service for other web sites and client-side applications by the name of Amazon Web Services. It is a collection of web services / cloud computing services that together build a cloud computing platform. Across the world, 12 geographical regions operate these services. The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud and Amazon Simple Storage Service are the best known among these services.
Facebook Graph
It is a semantic search engine that gives answers in user’s natural language. Since its introduction in March 2013, it has undergone several changes, including search features and search patterns. It combines big data from its more than billion users with external data and feeds it into a search engine that provides user-specific results. As far as privacy issues with handling user data is concerned, Facebook has alluded that any search through this platform occurs within the limits of pre-existing privacy settings, which keeps the users at ease and makes finding information more appealing. Its feature called Open Graph lets developers integrate their pages and apps in the Facebook platform, and link it with external data on the internet.
Gapminder
Gapminder World is a web-service that displays the time series of developmental statistics for every country and several sub-national regions. This service is produced by the Gapminder Foundation, which is a non-profit organization registered in Stockholm. The foundation states its goal as the promotion of sustainable global development and achievement of the United Nations Millennium Goals by increased use and understanding of statistics and other information about social, economic and environmental development at the local, national and global levels.
DBPedia
As the name suggests, it is an encyclopedia for Wikipedia entries. It is a crowd-sourced community effort that can be used to extract structured information from Wikipedia. With DBPedia, you can put sophisticated queries against Wikipedia, which means finding the answer to a complicated question becomes easier as you don’t have to keep track of multiple articles and entries. It also lets you link different data sets on the Internet to the data on Wikipedia.
Are there any sources that you would like to share? Tell us in the comments section.
