#64 Public data sources

Spike #64 - Public sources of Data

Ahmad Bin Amzah - 23/03/2019

Goals / Deliverables

Finding sources of data available to the public.

Technologies, Tools and Resources Used

• Search Engines (E.g. Google)
• Articles
• Forums

What we found out:

Governmental, institutional and organisational websites provide a wide range of data sets that is offered for both public access and use. Most of the data sets available on these websites however only include aggregated data. For example, an aggregated data set about heart disease shows only the amount of people diagnosed with heart disease instead of individual sets of data displaying information about those people who are diagnosed. In other words, information such as their heart rates, blood pressure, weight, etc are often either calculated as a total average or they are not included at all. The data set required for this project will need to include all medical information about each individual and therefore medical/health record data fulfill this requirement.

Health/Medical records can be provided by hospitals and organisations for research purposes. However, to acquire the data, the data needs to either be bought from the data provider or the data consumer must apply to request access to the database/data set. The only publicly available medical record data is sample data from a small handful of data providers including;

• https://wiki.openmrs.org/display/RES/Demo+Data
• http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/index.php