Open Data Sources

• Availability and access: the data must be available as a whole and at no more than a reasonable reproduction cost, preferably by downloading over the internet. The data must also be available in a convenient and modifiable form.
• Reuse and redistribution: the data must be provided under terms that permit reuse and redistribution including the intermixing with other datasets. The data must be machine-readable.
• Universal participation: everyone must be able to use, reuse and redistribute — there should be no discrimination against fields of endeavour or against persons or groups. For example, ‘non-commercial’ restrictions that would prevent ‘commercial’ use, or restrictions of use for certain purposes (e.g. only in education), are not allowed.

-- Definition by the Open Knowledge Foundation

Lists of Data Sets

• Interesting Data Sets for Statisticians - editorialized, entertaining set of open data

Open Data

• List of Public Datasets - user-curated
• DBpedia - utilizing a large multi-domain ontology
• Public Data Sets on AWS - common web crawl corpus, NASA satellite imagery, Human Genome, Google Book NGrams, Wikipedia Traffic, Million Song Dataset, Federal Reserve Economic Data, PubChem, more.

Private Opened Data

• New York Times - vocabulary as linked open data; linked vocabulary of people, places, companies, etc.

Governmental Data

Compendium of Governmental Open Data Sources

• Data.gov (USA)
• Africa Open Data
• US Census - Population Estimates and Projections, Nonemployer Statistics and County Business Patterns, Economic Indicators Time Series, more.

Non-Governmental Org Data

• The World Bank - business regulation measures, company-level data in emerging markets, household consumption patterns, World Development Indicators, World Bank finances
• ^Pew Research Center's Internet Project

Academic Data

Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research Data Portal

• Surveys of Economic Attitudes and Behavior
• Continuing Series of Consumer Surveys
• Historical and Contemporary Economic Processes and Indicators

Truly Random Data

• 200,000+ Jeopardy! Questions in a JSON file
• 10,000 annotated images of cats

Open Data Resources

• reddit r/datasets
• Open Data - Stack Exchange (discussion)

^ license is not truly open, involves some limitations