The Guardian has pulled together a collection of datasets drawn from the US:

• US public debt from 2001, US Treasury
• State population by race
• CO2 emissions by state
• Illegal migrants by state
• World CO2 emissions
• US2008 election results by county
• US population by state
• Iraq deaths by state
• US casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan
• Household income by state
• Unemployment by state
• Poverty rate by state
• GDP raw data

Simon Rogers gathered this information and shared the raw data via Google Spreadsheets for anyone to use. This means that people can grab the data in whatever format is most desirable including text, .csv, .xls, and .pdf.

Since access is open on each spreadsheet, it also means that developers can write client applications that interact directly with the data. Developers can access the same source data as either XML or JSON.

Fantastic stuff. Now, wouldn’t it be marvellous if we could find the same datasets for the UK and know that we could all share it for people to build on?

If you do know of any copyright- or charge-free (or both) sources for these for the UK, then please leave us a note in the comments.

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