where to find and download official databases for free?

More than 35,000 official databases are freely accessible. This means you can view accurate information that is continuously collected by qualified organizations, and this can be useful in many situations.

What types of information are accessible

It is possible to have access to information relating to:

• Large cities: surface area of ​​green spaces, number oftreestrees planted…
• Means of transport: statistics relating to passengers, punctuality of trains, etc.
• Companies: how many have more than 1,000 employees, which operate in a particular sector of activity…
• etc.

Use cases

Downloading some of these bases can be useful in many situations. So, if you build a applicationapplicationit is very interesting to be able to test it on an existing database. Likewise, if you have to prepare a presentation in Powerpoint or Excel, it is more than useful to have official data tables on a given theme.

A central access point

Thus, these multiple databases are kept up to date by thousands of different organizations. But is there an entry point to these various bases? Quite. It’s called Opendatasoft. The address to use is: https://data.opendatasoft.com/

You need to register but this is easy. Once you have validated your registration from a message sent by email, you can explore thousands of databases. On the home page, Opendatasoft offers several well-provided sources of information: Paris, SNCF, CNAM… You can start your search there. Once you choose a particular base, you are redirected to the corresponding website.

For example, you can click on SCNF. One of the proposed bases is entitled “Analysis of TER regularity and predictions”. Click View and then the Table tab. You have a database indicating for a month of the year the number of trains scheduled, late, canceled…

If you want to use such a database for your personal needs, click Export. Choose a format: CSV, Excel or other. You can then recover the data and use it for your personal applications.

Another solution is to use Opendatasoft’s search function to locate a particular database.