An open dataset is publicly accessible data that people can reuse, analyze, and redistribute with minimal access restrictions. Open data treats information collected about the public as a shared resource, allowing broader collective analysis. section 10.3.1
Open datasets commonly come from government agencies, international organizations, academic institutions, and nongovernmental organizations. They support organizational analysis by adding economic, demographic, utility, and other contextual information. section 10.4 section 10.3.2
Typical ways to find and use an open dataset include:
- Search a data portal or an organization’s data explorer. section 10.3.1 section 10.4
- Download a CSV or retrieve the data through an API. section 10.4
- Review the data catalog and variable definitions before analyzing complex datasets with hundreds or thousands of columns. section 10.4
- Prefer APIs carefully when available; scraped websites can change unexpectedly and may impose page or rate-limit rules. section 10.4
Government open-data portals
Examples include the federal Data.gov portal, San Francisco’s open data portal, and New York City’s and Chicago’s portals. Published datasets can include unemployment, inflation, GDP growth, census demographics, energy consumption, and utility production. section 10.3.1 section 10.3.2
Table 10.1 Research terms corresponding to industry terms and subdomains of analytics
|
Research domain
|
Search these research fields
|
|---|---|
|
Marketing analytics
|
Market research, consumer behavior
|
|
Human resources analytics
|
Industrial/organizational psychology, personnel psychology, social psychology
|
|
Financial analytics
|
Financial metrics, business performance indicators, econometrics
|
|
Product analytics
|
Cognitive psychology, behavioral psychology
|
|
All of analytics
|
Statistical methods, analysis, machine learning, measurement development
|
Use the research-to-industry mapping to identify search fields for analytics questions involving public datasets. section 10.3.2
