Data Surfing on the World Wide Web

Purpose of this page: To provide links to

Primarily intended for use by students and teachers in applied statistics courses.

Send comments to: Robin Lock at St. Lawrence University e-mail: rlock@stlawu.edu

Individual Datasets

Bodyfat an example of one of the many datasets at Statlib. The file contains documentation followed by the raw data.

Want to know the winning horses, times, margins, and purses for all runnings of the Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs?

US News & World Report's College/University Data links to material from their annual review.

Food Composition Dataset is provided by the US Dept. of Agriculture (USDA). This large (125K) comma-delimited ASCII file gives detailed nutrition breakdown for 908 food items. A key to interpreting the data coding can be found in the Food Composition Documentation file.

Repositories of Datasets

Journal of Statistics Education Data Archive Datasets contributed by statistics teachers. Raw data are given in a .dat file with explanations of the variables in an accompanying .doc file. Several of these datasets are tied to longer JSE articles discussing their use in statistics classes. For example, try televisions.dat ,televisions.txt, and Rossman article for some data on life expectancy and numbers of televisions in various countries.

DASL The Dataset and Story Library - a collection of datasets and related documentation (stories) which may be searched by data subjects or by statistical techniques.

Statlib Dataset Archive One of the original (and still best) sources for archived data.

CHANCE Project Datasets Data from recent media coverage of current events. Only a few datasets here, but many excellent references to teaching applications of statistics in the news can be found at the main CHANCE page.

Electronic Dataset Service A collection of links to datasets organized by statistical methods (multiple regression, time series, etc.). Housed at the University of Massachusetts - Amherst.

Textbook Datasets

Data A collection of datasets by Andrews and Herzberg - stored at Statlib.

Handbook of Small Datasets by Hand, Lund, McConway, & Ostrowski. Raw datafiles are stored at UCLA but you'll need the book for descriptions of the data.

The Basic Practice of Statistics Datasets from David Moore's textbook. Available in ASCII format in the JSE Data Archive.

Additional Data Sources

FEDSTATS is billed as your "One Stop Shopping" location for Web access to data produced by U.S. Government agencies, such as...

The Census Bureau, like many government agencies, produces loads of available data. For example, you can find entries from the Statistical Abstract of the United States including tables ranking states for all sorts of variables (e.g. crime statistics). Similar data ranking urban areas can be found from the County and City Data Book.

Or try the USDA Economics and Statistics System at Cornell University.
 

Other Lists of Data Resources

Dr. B's Wide World of Web Data. An extensive collection of data sources maintained by John Behrens (Dr. B) at Arizona State.

Sports Data Page Links to current and archived data related to various sports.

Statistical Resources on the Web - part of the on-line Documents Center at Univ. of Michigan.

SEARCH for Your Own Data

Web search engines help you find data related to a topic of your choice. Several favorites are

C-Net's Search Let's you pick from among many of the most popular searchers.

YAHOO! One of the original search engines - still a good place browse trees of related links.

AltaVista One of the most comprehensive.

Want to Study the Web itself? Here's a link to go to a randomly chosen webpage

Random Yahoo! Link chosen from Yahoo's extensive list of URL's.