

Open Data Stack Exchange - jbcurtin2
http://opendata.stackexchange.com/

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blueblob
As somebody who has spent lots of time trying to find free (for academic use)
data in natural language processing, I _really_ hope this becomes quite
popular.

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saimey
It doesn't seem to be overly busy, but some of the questions caught my
attention, and I was pleased to learn that the answers are actually friendly
and helpful.

Thanks for introducing me to the site!

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xradionut
There's a lot of open data available, depending on what you are looking for.
If I had time, I could probably spend it on this SE and earn points, count
coup, or whatever. Instead I'm working with a couple of user groups helping
local programmers analysts learn how to dig into it. We have a few specific
data sets that we use for different types of analysis, demographic, mapping
and financial.

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danso
I'm real glad to see this on the HN frontpage and I'm kind of surprised that I
didn't submit it at some point...I joined the beta just to contribute some
material/upvotes so it could be approved. I honestly don't use it that much on
a day to day basis, but having had used it, and occasionally answering
questions...it does fill a real niche that regular Stack Overflow doesn't.

If you were to ask me before, I'd think that the StackOverflow would be good
enough because many, many data problems are programming related (how to parse
one format, database optimization, etc)...but there are issues specific to
data, such as denormalization...not _how_ or necessarily _when_ to do it at
the database schema, but why...or rather, given a set of data (such as from
the gov't) in which normalization was obviously not done...what is the most
sensical compromise that you should do in organizing the data?

Anyway, hope more people get into it...I've worked in data for awhile and now,
having to think about it, it's definitely a big enough field with enough
questions to justify a vibrant SE board.

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elandybarr
88 upvotes and only 3 comments. Am I missing something or Friday?

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pseut
As someone who upvoted but didn't comment: I'd like the site to get exposure
so it will be more useful, but I don't have anything specific to say about it.

