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Ask HN: Is there a GitHub-like service that can host scientific data sets?
3 points by niels_olson on Sept 19, 2014 | hide | past | favorite | 6 comments
As a biomed researcher just starting to collect my first data, I would like to make it public, but I don't want to be responsible for the maintenance. I can make the code available. Is Github the right answer for the datasets too?


You need to figure out a few things.

Who is going to use your data? Do they know the format? Do they know how it was collected or generated? Can they reproduce it? Can they understand why it's useful? Is there a paper or other document they can use to understand things?

If someone has questions about the data, who do they contact? (I mention this because that's part of the broader sense of 'maintenance'.)

How big is the data? If it's 1K then you can store it just about anywhere. If it's 1TB then you are much more limited.

How long do you want the data to last? How important is it that it survives past your winning the $70 million jackpot tomorrow and deciding to retire on an internet-free atoll in the south Pacific?

In most cases I deal with, the answers are: 1) almost no one cares about the data until it's been published, 2) it's maybe a few MB, and 3) 5-10 years is fine.

If so, then github, bitbucket, etc. all work fine.


Figshare: http://figshare.com/

DataDryad is another, but it's specifically for data associated with journal publications: http://datadryad.org/


You might want to be more specific about the exact type of data that you're dealing with as there might be something relevant to the particular subfield. In general though, I do not know of an all encompassing throw-your-huge-data-here-for-free website.


A project you should look into and keep an eye on is Dat, a "Git for Data": http://dat-data.com/


Check out http://opendata.stackexchange.com/ - a very similar question has been asked there.


How is the data formatted?




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