1. Economy
Gapminder
Economic, health, and social statistics covered by the World Health Organization and the World Bank
CIA, The World Factbook
Contains information on history, population, economy, government, infrastructure, and military affairs for 267 countries
National Bureau of Statistics of China latest macroeconomic data
Ministry of Industry and Information Technology A good deal of data is published here, especially data related to industrial operations and informatization
People’s Bank of China Data related to China’s financial market policy and operations
China Banking Regulatory Commission Banking and financial data
China Customs Data related to China’s imports and exports
State Intellectual Property Office of China Patent-related lookups
China Securities Regulatory Commission A platform for disclosing related policies and prospectuses, as well as the weekly disclosure of the queue of companies planning to list
National Equities Exchange and Quotations (New Third Board) Transfer and information disclosure for New Third Board-listed companies
Shanghai Municipal Government Data Service Portal Centrally publishes data products and data applications from government departments and third-party institutions; the data covers economics, education, health, transportation, geography, law, planning, and more.
Shanghai Public R&D Platform You can register, with manual review; it contains many databases
China Economic Database Provides the most extensive and most accurate information on the world’s developed and developing economies.
China Economic Information Network
Industry research reports, with fairly complete macroeconomic data. The China Economic Information Network, abbreviated CEInet, is a professional information service network established by the State Information Center, with the provision of economic information as its main business
2. Finance
Wind Database
Pros: (1) The data table structure is fairly sound, and there are many different tools, such as a small WACC calculation plugin, a small beta calculation plugin, and templates for doing valuations directly in EXCEL. (2) The user experience is very good, the interface is first-rate, and it suits Chinese usage habits. (3) The specialty databases stand out, with China A\B share data, fund data, bond data, and futures data all very prominent. (4) The information content structure heavily imitates BLOOMBERG. (5) It supports API plugins. Cons: (1) Actually, I want to stress that the data quality is only average; some of it still has many errors β for example, errors in the index database are almost identical to Yahoo Finance. (2) International databases such as world indices are still average. (3) It mainly provides information; the order-entry channel is not as powerful as Bloomberg’s. (4) Industry data is severely lacking, and the quality really is not good.
Hundsun Gildata Pros: (1) Although the interface design is not as flashy as Wind’s, it is very solid, very practical, and very convenient. The data structure is also sound and does not suffer from excessive redundancy. (2) The price is cheaper than Wind’s, but the value for money is quite high. (3) A\B share data is its strong point. (4) Research reports are updated relatively quickly, fairly comprehensively, and are better in quality than Wind’s. (5) The data quality is rock solid.
CSMAR Database Pros: (1) Corporate finance data is its strong point β very powerful and complete; I use it often, haha. (2) As an academic database it is fairly comprehensive. Even data from earlier years is included. (3) Its high-frequency data is the second best in the country. (4) Its corporate governance data is quite good and detailed, including company control-chain diagrams. Cons: (1) Because it is an academic database, updates are not fast enough. Institutions will absolutely not use it. (2) Some of the data structure design has problems. (3) It lacks news-type data. (4) Its industry data updates more slowly than any other database; I suggest not using its industry database.
CNINFO Database Pros: (1) Exchange announcements and board resolutions are always available the fastest. (2) The abnormal-movement records in the abnormal-movement database definitely number more than just the top ten; you can even see the top 15, haha! Cons: (1) The data structure is too old and has serious problems β I’ve seen 5 fields used as a table’s primary key; speechless. (2) Take the abnormal-movement database: it puts all bonds, stocks, warrants, and turbos together, and once I stepped on a landmine and pulled out both bonds and stocks, because the stock code = the bond code. Truly mortifying. (3) The calculation method in the abnormal-movement data is seriously incorrect; if you look up the exchange’s calculation method for price-limit deviation values, you will find it is very different before and after August 4, 2006. Once again that made me step on a landmine. (4) Data quality is average, not what you’d call good.
Zero2IPO Database The Zero2IPO research database covers venture capital, private equity, entrepreneur-related investment, private placement, M&A, and IPO databases, spanning investment institutions, enterprises, and investment figures across TMT, traditional industries, clean technology, biotech and health, and other sectors. It is used relatively little for market events and focuses on PE and venture capital data.
3. Nature
National Climatic Data Center
Huge environmental, meteorological, and climate datasets come from the U.S. National Climatic Data Center. The world’s largest archive of weather data.
OpenStreetMap
Free map data covering the whole globe, dynamically updated every week
EnviCloud It obtains various kinds of environmental data published by authoritative sources (China Weather Network, National Meteorological Center, Data Center of the Ministry of Environmental Protection, U.S. Global Earthquake Information Center, and so on), as well as the various nationwide environmental monitoring sensor networks independently deployed by Yunchuang.
4. Trends
Google Trends Shows the proportion of total search volume (searches) for any given term since 2004
5. Public
Amazon Web Services Public Data Sets A huge public data resource, including the 1000 Genomes Project, which attempts to build the most comprehensive database of human genetic information, and NASA’s database of satellite imagery of Earth
Facebook Graph Although most of the information in a user’s Facebook profile is private, a lot of it is not β Facebook provides a way to query a great deal of information through the Graph API, which its users are happy to share with the world (or cannot hide, because their privacy settings are not working
DBPedia Wikipedia is made up of millions of pieces of data, structured and unstructured, on every subject under the sun. DBPedia is an ambitious project to catalog and create a public, freely distributable database that allows anyone to analyze this data
Google Open Database A community-compiled database of structured data about people, places, and things, with more than 45 million entries
Figshare A research-output sharing platform, where you will find research results shared by top experts from around the world, and get the underlying research data at the same time; the content is very inspiring.
Qixin Services for quickly looking up company business-registration information, court judgment information, affiliated-company information, judicial auction information, dishonesty records, judgment-debtor information, intellectual property information, company news, and recruitment information.
Octoparse A simple and practical scraper with complete features and easy operation β no need to write rules. Its distinctive cloud scraping lets collection tasks run on cloud servers even when your machine is off.
GooSeeker An easy-to-use web information scraping tool that can extract text, charts, hyperlinks, and many other web page elements; it provides a handy web scraping tool along with data-mining guides, industry news, and frontier technology.
Haoservice API data interfaces; an accurate, comprehensive, and fast one-stop data service platform, and a data platform under Beijing Changyou Internet.
Image Recognition Open Platform API data interfaces
Tngou Cloud API data interfaces; an open platform for health, medical care, daily life, and agriculture)
JisuAPI API data interfaces
Baidu API Store API data interfaces
Juhe API data interfaces, custom data for developers, paid data calls
