About Infochimps
infochimps.org is a community whose mission is to increase the world’s access to data
Infochimps was founded by two physicists and educators in Austin who wanted to solve many of the problems involved in working with big data. The third founder is an entrepreneur with an interest in innovation and projects that can change the world.
The website, infochimps.org, is their first step towards that mission. Infochimps.org is a website where anyone can upload a dataset and make it a rich addition to the large library with good metadata tagging and descriptions. Much of the data will be free and come with an open license. Commercial data is also encouraged in the library as vendors can choose their price and license. An open marketplace for data encourages more data collection, more sharing, and the building of the millions of innovative services that can be built on top of good data sources.
The Infochimps team works on a few other open source projects for data.
You can browse for data by using the search bar, exploring categories or tags, by datasets’ rating, or by fields. All of these options are accessible on our homepage, http://infochimps.org/
Infochimps encourages users to complete as much metadata about the datasets as they can. Each dataset has an information tab for Sources. If the dataset has no information for the source, you can add it yourself or contact the user who uploaded the dataset.
Infochimps uses Creative Commons licensing for most datasets. If the license is not clear enough on what the data may be used for, you may contact us or the user who uploaded the dataset.
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Infochimps.org lets you make interesting data available to all. You get the credit, you choose the price and the license, and the world gets a little bit smarter.
The editing features is not available yet, nor can the public upload their own data. Check back with us soon for when these features are online.
If it’s broadly interesting, we want to host or point to it.
A table giving the best known values for all the physical constants and fundamental particles is highly desirable; a petabyte of raw sensor values from the LHCb beam at the CERN supercollider is outside our scope. Weekly water consumption for each major metropolitan area is interesting, but a three-year table showing how much your water bill was each month is not. (Of course, if it were something awesomely obsessive like ’’everything you did, saw and spent money on for a year’’ then it’s interesting again.)
Infochimps encourages users to complete as much metadata about the datasets as they can. Each dataset has an information tab for Sources. If the dataset has no information for the source, you can add it yourself or contact the user who uploaded the dataset.
License terms are set by those who create the dataset, and never by infochimps.org. When a dataset is uploaded users are encouraged to complete the sources and licensing information. If the license is not clear, please contact the “main source” or the user who uploaded the dataset.
If you’d like to contribute data to the commons under open terms, the best thing for all is to license it under either Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License or one of the Open Knowledge Definition Licenses. This will allow us to share your data widely and for free.
If you see content that you believe is inappropriate, or which has been posted in violation of its copyright or terms of service, email help@infochimps.org. We will promptly remove it and notify both parties in accordance with DMCA resolution.
In order to fuel rapid growth and encourage the farflung tribe of infochimps, we’re outsourcing across the whole simian family. Reportedly many humans are contributing to the site as well.