Open Data on GitHub: Unlocking the Potential of AI
Anthony Cintron Roman Kevin Xu Arfon Smith Jehu Torres Vega Caleb Robinson Juan M Lavista Ferres
GitHub is the world's largest platform for collaborative software
development, with over 100 million users. GitHub is also used extensively for
open data collaboration, hosting more than 800 million open data files,
totaling 142 terabytes of data. This study highlights the potential of open
data on GitHub and demonstrates how it can accelerate AI research. We analyze
the existing landscape of open data on GitHub and the patterns of how users
share datasets. Our findings show that GitHub is one of the largest hosts of
open data in the world and has experienced an accelerated growth of open data
assets over the past four years. By examining the open data landscape on
GitHub, we aim to empower users and organizations to leverage existing open
datasets and improve their discoverability -- ultimately contributing to the
ongoing AI revolution to help address complex societal issues. We release the
three datasets that we have collected to support this analysis as open datasets
at https://github.com/github/open-data-on-github.