Thanks for all the data!

The United States is celebrating Thanksgiving today. Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, because it allows everyone, regardless of their religion or personal philosophy, to join together as a nation in thanks for the many wonderful things this world provides.

This year is a particularly great Thanksgiving, because we have a newly elected President. Billions of people throughout the world hope that our new leadership will contribute to multinational efforts to reduce global warming, to use resources wisely and fairly, and to reduce violence and disease.

As someone who specializes in the field of biomedical informatics, I am personally grateful for the infrastructure that permits me to contribute to society, just by sitting at my computer and using the publicly available digital resources.

Here is the list of free resources that I am particularly grateful for (many of which accept charitable contributions):

Searchable information
PubMed
Wikipedia
Google
Google Earth

Languages and software
Perl
Ruby
Python
R
ImageMagick
OpenOffice


Datasets
SEER
Entrez
U.S. Census
Taxonomy.dat
OMIM
NASA images


Nomenclatures and ontologies
MESH
ICD
NCI Thesaurus
GO

Standards and protocols
HTML
XML
RDF
HTTP
FTP
JPEG
PNG

Organizations
GNU
OBO
CPAN

There are many many others, but these are all that I can think of at the moment. Please feel free to add your favorite free data resources, for which you are particularly thankful.

Happy Thanksgiving,

-Jules Berman