Ways to Find Datasets: Dataset Search

• data.gov: Look for the data.gov site for the country you are interested in where typically you will find data supplied by government sources. For example for Ireland go to https://data.gov.ie/ where you will find more than 10,000 datasets on topics like energy, environment and transport. For Australia go to https://data.gov.au/where you will find more than 80,000 datasets. Usually these sites have their own search tool as well as a dataset catalog. And you can find datasets particularly pertinent to the country - such as coral reefs for Australia
• city data: Many cities have open data initiatives like New York City at https://opendata.cityofnewyork.us/ , Paris at https://opendata.paris.fr/ , Berlin at https://daten.berlin.de/
• weather: Look for the weather data in the US at weather.gov from there you can find your way to the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) datasets https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/datasets and model data https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access/model-data/model-datasets and aviation data metar https://www.aviationweather.gov/metar and a lot more. Some countries offer tools to explore climate data like the Netherlands at https://climexp.knmi.nl/start.cgi
  

• nasa.data.gov: The NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) open data portal offers tens of thousands of datasets which are often used in the annual NASA Space Apps Challenge

• UNdata: You can find data about agriculture, crime, education, energy, industry, labor, national accounts, population and tourism at UNdata. The statistics available through UNdata are produced by United Nations Statistics and Population Divisions as well as other United Nations agencies.

• Open Knowledge Foundation: that lists over 550 data portals from around the world http://datacatalogs.org/
  
• Open datasets in the cloud: where you will find datasets like the IoT-based earthquake early-warning (EEW) from Grillo
• Kaggle : where you will find many datasets often used in contests https://www.kaggle.com/datasets for example 24 years of data on wildfires in the US https://www.kaggle.com/rtatman/188-million-us-wildfires
• Wikipedia List of Machine Learning Datasets : where you will find lists of labeled datasets for machine learning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_datasets_for_machine-learning_research

License and Privacy Considerations

It is easier to use factual datasets such as measurements, tabular data, land mass, reservoirs, weather – avoiding personal data, such as names, pictures of people that may have privacy concerns which vary from country to country.

Occasionally you will find datasets which will state that they are for academic use only. The owners’ are usually fine with the dataset being used in a hackathon setting, but it is best to check. An example of such a dataset is a multimodal (image and text) Deep Learning For Disaster Response dataset https://gitlab.com/awadailab/crisis_multimodal> which states that it is available for download only for academic purposes. In this case, we have confirmed with the author that she is agreeable that the dataset may be used in hackathons, particularly those for social good. You can take a similar approach. And please note if you move on and start selling the software you created in the hackathon, or make it part of a product, then you should not use datasets that are marked for academic use.

Many datasets, where there is a license specified, will have a Creative Commons (CC) license. An example of such a dataset is the earthquake data EEW Be aware that the CC by NC variant means that the dataset cannot be used for commercial purposes.