Quality Repositories, is a website that comes out of a stats (?) course at University of Maryland. It aims to evaluate the usefulness and availability of various sources of public data, from US Government, non-US government, academic, and sports related (?) data sets. Evaluations are based on criteria such as: online availability, browsability, searchability, retrievable formats etc. The about text:

Data repositories provide a valuable resource for the public; however, the lack of standards in terminology, presentation, and access of this data across repositories reduces the accessibility and usability of these important data sets. This problem is complex and likely requires a community effort to identify what makes a “good” repository, both in technical and information terms. This site provides a starting point for this discussion….

This site suggests criteria for evaluating repositories and applies them to a list of statistical repositories. We’ve selected statistical data because it is one of the simplest data types to access and describe. Since our purpose is partly to encourage visualization tools, statistical data is also one of the easiest to visualize. The list is not comprehensive but should grow over time. By “repositories” we mean a site that provides access to multiple tables of data that they have collected. We did not include sites that linked to other site’s data sources.

The site was created by Rachael Bradley, Samah Ramadan and Ben Shneiderman.

(Tip to Jon Udell and http://del.icio.us/tag/publicdata)