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I’ve come across this a few different times over the years... always seems enticing and potentially useful, but I’ve never found a real use for it. I suppose it provides a library of well-prepped datasets to test ML models on? Anyone ever used this for any practical purpose beyond a sandbox-type use case?
I certainly tried my current projects on it, and found some useful stuff (most of which I've seen before).
Doesn't take a genius to predict, but there ya go! Governments are assembling datasets in a very fragmented way. It'll take a private company to provide one single website to explore and find all datasets from around the world, making it easier to look at holistic patterns that are happening around the world, or compare patterns between countries.
Though, I would expect a much better UX from Google nowadays. This site has more in common with Google Scholar than Google Search.
And ultimately I'd like to see them build something where people don't need to download datasets in order to make use of the data.
I compare the state of open data to the state of mapping software before Google Maps. You needed to download map files and open them on special software that you open on your computer to make sense of the data. And then Google Maps came along and flipped that whole model. Open data needs the same leap forward in order for more people to make greater use of open data.
This is a great resource. At Splitgraph, we index ~40k open data sets, and we make sure to include structured metadata for each one, so we show up in these results. (example [0]) One cool aspect of this metadata is that it allows a dataset to have multiple sources. So if two sites index the same dataset, there is no duplicate content penalty like there might be with textual content. If you search for a dataset, it wi…