Data Sources

Public data is information collected by government agencies that is made available to everyone. This data can cover topics such as demographic statistics, economic indicators, public health information, and environmental metrics. Public data can be used to help us understand communities, assess needs, evaluate the degree to which communities are represented and resourced, and gauge exposure to environmental or policy concerns. In some topic areas the government, foundations, or advocacy groups have created convenient visualizations to foster the understanding of public data. Businesses also leverage public data to create commercial products.

One of the challenges of using data to inform our decisions is finding usable sources of data. In the list that follows we’ve attempted to eliminate some of that guess work. Click the blue button to see a list of the data sources we’ve collected in this effort. The table below filters this list by interest areas—data sources that don’t fit into these categories, however, will only be found on the full list. This effort is on-going. Please submit data sources that Extension colleagues might find useful to michael.brenneis@wisc.edu.