Friday Free Stuff: Government Open Data Initiatives

13 April 2012

Last year I mentioned in passing New Zealand's Government datasets online website - a directory linking to over 1800 publicly-available, government-held datasets. You can search on the main page or browse, filtering by category, agency, license and format; and you can request new datasets be released.

New Zealand isn't the only country doing this - the USA's Data.gov links to 31 countries with governmental open data websites.

And lots of people are doing fantastic things with the datasets. One lovely one, from France, is Monuments historiques, which uses governmental and other open data to which let you search or browse for the data, description, and images of nearly 44,000 monuments in France by type, historic period, region -- or Metro stop.

Deborah Fitchett
Liaison Librarian