As any data scientist knows, data science and machine learning algorithms require large datasets from real-world research and experiments. Data help analysts build models to understand current trends, discover hidden attributes and make predictions about the future. However, collecting, archiving, updating, and hosting large datasets is costly and time-consuming. This makes freely available data repositories incredibly important. Here we list 10 of the best health and science open data platforms. These platforms host valuable datasets related to different categories. These categories include information trends about diseases, genetics, food, nutrition, earth sciences, planetary missions, and much more. Best of all, you can browse these repositories and download the datasets that best meet your needs. Data like this is a great addition to any
data visualization tool.
Repository 1: HealthData.gov
HealthData.gov is an official United States government website. It is committed to improving health outcomes by making data more accessible to researchers, academics, policymakers, and other interested organizations. HealthData.gov has more than 3000 health-related datasets with API support for developers.
Repository 2: Food and Drug Administration
The
Food and Drug Administration (FDA) website is also an official United States government website. I addition to being an important resource for healthcare professionals, educators, and students, the FDA also maintains complete data related to vaccines, medical devices, drugs, cosmetics, food, and other products.
Repository 3: World Health Organization
Next, the
World Health Organization (WHO) hosts an invaluable resource of complete health data. This resource focuses on areas like nutrition, diseases, drug use, as well as health technologies. You can download WHO data in JSON, CSV, and Excel formats using their APIs.
Repository 4: Broad Institute
Also on the list is
The Broad Institute, a research organization affiliated with MIT and Harvard. The institute specializes in genomic medicine and biomedical research. It maintains various freely available datasets you can employ to build models for bioinformatics and computational biology.
Repository 5: National Health Services
The UK National Health Services maintain
NHS Digital. This resource employs data to improve health and support top-quality medical research. You can download datasets related to the United Kingdom’s social care and health systems here.
Repository 6: Center For Disease Control
The
Center for Disease Control (CDC) is another site that hosts and supports a vast range of datasets relating to health. Some of its categories include alcohol use, environmental health, diseases, life expectancy, and oral health. You can easily view and download datasets from their site.
Repository 7: National Cancer Institute
The
National Cancer Institute hosts the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) Program. This institute promotes research on different types of cancers. You can access the statistics on their portal.
Repository 8: NASA Planetary Data System
NASA Planetary Data System or PDA is a comprehensive archive of science data. NASA made the data acquired from various space missions and also lab experiments public. There are thousands of datasets that researchers, academics, and scientists can browse and download.
Repository 9: Open Science Data Cloud
Open Science Data Cloud or OSDC is a comprehensive archive of large-scale science datasets. These are huge, like terabyte or petabyte sizes. Academics and scientists use the platform to manage and share large datasets as well as run analytics on them.
Repository 10: NASA Earth Data Systems
Finally, we have the
NASA Earth Data Systems (ESDS) platform for scientific data. This NASA program hosts open data related to the planet earth. It also shares statistics acquired using various instruments and from NASA missions. Most importantly, NASA published its data systems as open-source software (OSS).
How Can I Visualize Big Datasets in Health and Science?
Obviously, the trick to understanding large datasets is finding a tool that will allow you to read them. While there are certainly many graphing and charting tools out there,
FusionCharts is one platform that stands out. FusionCharts offers ease of use, a variety of charts and graphs, and clear documentation in addition to beautiful presentations. You can build interactive charts, graphs, and also dashboards in minutes using FusionCharts APIs. Finally, FusionCharts comes with 100+ charts, graphs, and gauges along with 2000+ choropleth maps. FusionCharts incorporates both cross-browser support and consistent APIs for building mobile and desktop apps. There are numerous tutorials for building specialized and domain-specific visualizations of data including radar charts, 2D and 3D column charts, heatmaps, as well as bubble plots and pie charts. It is possible to create responsive and interactive dashboards in all popular frameworks including React, Svelte, Java, Python, PHP, Ruby on Rails, and more.
Sign up for your free FusionCharts trial today and make the most of all the open health and science data sources!