There are only two more weeks left to enter the Best Report Contest and win $5000! Show off your most creative and informative report that makes great use of Power BI, and submit it using this entry form by January 29th. We’ll publish the 10 finalists on the Power BI Community website, and then open voting for the winner.
For all the details, including the contest rules, visit our Community Contest forum here.
The first step in creating a Best Report is finding a dataset that engages your imagination. Fortunately, thanks to the internet and a modern push for transparency there are literally thousands of public databases available for your analysis, covering topics both serious and silly.
Below we’ve put together a list of 6 interesting, diverse datasets that are available for free right now. Do a deep dive into a single comprehensive catalog, or compare and contrast multiple sets together to create unique insights on our world and ourselves. With Power BI, the only limit is your curiosity!
6 Interesting Public Datasets
- More and more cities are launching public open data portals that feature a wide variety of information that interests citizens. The city of Seattle in particular is sharing something unique: all of their 911 Incident Response data from 2001 to present day.
- Meanwhile, the city of San Francisco has also taken on a unique dataset in their open data portal, with a complete list of movie filming locations in their city since 1924.
- America is a large country, and we spend a lot of time on the road getting from place to place. The Federal Highway Administration publishes charts of traffic volume trends from 2002 to present day, broken down by date, region, and population density.
- Local Inspector Value-Entry Specification, or LIVES, is an open data standard for municipalities to use when publishing restaurant health inspection data. So far eleven cities and counties have published their data under LIVES in partnership with Yelp.
- Wikipedia, one of the most popular websites in the world, just recently published an API that shares their pageview data. The API is built on a RESTful architecture and can be retrieved through a number of different methods.
- This popular game show has over 200,000 questions collected in a JSON file. If you answered, “What is Jeopardy!?”, you’re correct! Fans have collected 216,930 Jeopardy! questions, to be precise, together in a single file along with the answer, the question value, and the air date.