With the current global emphasis on sharing research data with the public, you might wonder - what can the public actually do with data? How can they access it, understand it, or apply it? Why might it be of interest to them, or you?

The term 'data' refers to an item of information, or, items of information considered collectively for reference or analysis (OED). 'Data' applies across disciplines and could refer to statistics on the publication of comic books, DNA sequencing or, marine life in the Arctic - it can refer to countless sets of information.

The purpose of this post then is to enlighten readers about interesting and engaging ways that data is currently being presented and utilised on the web to inform the public about current issues, and other information available to them. For starters, did you know that everyone contributes to the growing wealth of digital data, whether you work in research or not? Take a look at this infographic from Mashable - every owner of a mobile phone, email address or iTunes account produces data in the digital age. You can also check out the impact of real-time tweets across the world via A World of Tweets.

The UK's newspaper The Guardian frequently experiments with public data and uses it to support current news stories. It has a dedicated 'Datablog' with the sole purpose of transforming data into useful and easily understandable formats about key issues important to the UK and globally. Some examples include: Water leakages: which company is the worst?; The world's top 100 airports: listed, ranked and mapped; Freedom of Information request 2011: how many were there and which ones were turned down?; or What does 15 years of baby name data tell us about modern Britain?.
The Guardian sites all sources of data and makes data freely available to every reader.

Other sites and services, and particularly research centers, make data available for download to use in your own way, or create visual representations for the reader or researcher. Visualisation and infographics are the terms generally used to describe this process and there are many tools available online that allow you to work with data in this way. A few examples of such tools include: Piktochart, Gephi, Tableau public and Taxgedo.

So where can you get public data?

Apart from researchers being increasingly required to share data, many governments are also opening up data for the public (see http://data.gov.uk, http://www.data.gov/ and http://data.gov.au). You can also try datacatalogs.org - a list of open data throughout the world; The Data Hub - where you can find, share and collaborate on data; Google Public Data; or, Freebase. But there are many places to acquire data if you do a simple online search or investigate your University's academic research centers and faculty websites.

Who is talking about data in the public realm?

Beyond the academic sphere, there are large communities online discussing data and its use in the public, as well as foundations geared towards data investigation. For example, the Knight Foundation in the US has organised the Civic Data Challenge whereby citizens of the US (aged thirteen and above) are invited to access, analyse, interpret and visualise data from Civic Health CPS datasets. In addition, there are many interested individuals proactively investigating, sharing and blogging about data. Here are a few sites worth checking and some blogs worth following: Visual.ly; Well-formed Data; Daily Infographic; Visualising Data; Visualising.org; The Guardian's Datablog; and a personal favourite - Information is Beautiful.

In this video, David McCandless of Information is Beautiful illustrates the importance (and perhaps playfulness) of contextualising research data and information through creative visual means.

The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) is supportive of open data and sharing data to further collaboration and research in the biosciences.

A challenge that NCBI is faced with today, is to transform the wealth of data emerging from laboratories worldwide into knowledge which will "lead to a better understanding of biological processes underlying both health and disease."

NCBI disseminates its resources to research and medical communities with the view to integrate data and shape more meaningful views of this information. This challenge has been met through the development of a large number of databases and shared data available from the NCBI site.

Two datasets of note include,GenBank and dbGap:

GenBank

GenBank database is maintained by the National Institutes of Health and made available through NCBI. The database stores all known public DNA sequences. Data are submitted to GenBank from individual scientists and science centres involved with the Human Genome Project, and are also annotated and labelled by NCBI investigators.

dbGaP

dbGap is the database of Genotypes and Phenotypes (dbGaP). It was developed to archive and distribute the results of studies that have investigated the interaction of genotype and phenotype. dbGap has two levels of access - open and controlled. The open-access data can be browsed online or downloaded.

NCBI also provides a variety of tools to use and explore the data, as well as a range of educational materials, how-to guides and training resources.

Despite the inevitable funding cuts that austerity budgets bring, it's really not a bad time to be a UK researcher - lots of organisations want to help you manage and share your data.

First up, there's the new open access world opening up, courtesy of a UK government mandate.

Then digital-science offered a whole range of useful tools like figshare and LabGuru.

And now the Digital Curation Centre has listed a stack of handy services and tools for sharing output and tracking impact and managing active research data.

If you are a manager of a repository or the curator of a digital collection, there are tools for archiving and preserving information packages, managing and administering repositories and depositing and ingesting digital objects.

With all sorts of data going open, could The Open Source Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse have been far behind?

It's the Zeitgeist, stupid, or so the site tells us.

"In the past decade, 439 zombie-themed films were made, as compared to only 65 in the previous decade."

That's a lot of shambling bodies!

The PDF takes you through everything you need to know post-Zombie take-over - how to manage energy, find your friends (sounds like Facebook will still be going), stay alive and rebuild civilisation.

Not a big ask, really, especially when it can all be done with open source data.