Azure Open Datasets are curated public datasets

Datasets include public-domain data for weather, census, holidays, public safety, and location that help you train machine learning models and enrich predictive solutions. You can also share your public datasets on Azure Open Datasets.

Curated, prepared datasets

Curated open public datasets in Azure Open Datasets are optimized for consumption in machine learning workflows.

Data scientists often spend the majority of their time cleaning and preparing data for advanced analytics. Open Datasets are copied to the Azure cloud and preprocessed to save you time. At regular intervals data is pulled from the sources, such as by an FTP connection to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), parsed into a structured format, and then enriched as appropriate with features such as ZIP Code or location of the nearest weather station.

Datasets are cohosted with cloud compute in Azure making access and manipulation easier.

Following are examples of datasets available.

Weather data

Calendar data

Access to datasets

With an Azure account, you can access open datasets using code or through the Azure service interface. The data is colocated with Azure cloud compute resources for use in your machine learning solution.

Open Datasets provides Azure Notebooks and Azure Databricks notebooks you can use to connect data to Azure Machine Learning service and Azure Databricks. Datasets can also be accessed through a Python SDK.

However, you don't need an Azure account to access Open Datasets; you can access them from any Python environment without or without Spark.

Request or contribute datasets

If you can't find the data you want, request a dataset or contribute a dataset.