Tier A - Academic and foundation
34 sources for what regulators do not cover.
Asset-level emissions tracking. Long-horizon economic series. Geographic and infrastructure data. Research and citation provenance. Internet health metrics. Climate, weather, and marine data. Knowledge graphs. Reference datasets. Maritime and trade activity. Where no government source exists, foundation and research institutions are the canonical reference.
Asset-level Emissions (Global)
Climate TRACE
Independent coalition of WattTime, RMI, Carbon Plan, TransitionZero, Global Energy Monitor, and Al Gore. Tracks facility-level greenhouse gas emissions across 2.77 million sources in 252 countries and territories. For asset-level decisions when regulator-reported aggregates are too coarse.
Economic Series Long-horizon (Global)
Maddison Project and Penn World Table
Both from Groningen GGDC. Maddison Project provides GDP and population for 169 countries from year 1 to 2022. Penn World Table extends with productivity, capital stock, and human capital for 185 countries from 1950 to 2023. Research-grade canonical references that no national agency produces.
Geographic and Infrastructure Data (Global)
WRI Global Power Plants, OpenAIP, OpenStreetMap
World Resources Institute's Global Power Plant Database catalogs 30,000+ generation facilities. OpenAIP for community-maintained aviation infrastructure - airports and airspaces. OpenStreetMap via Overpass API for queryable geographic features and Nominatim for geocoding - roads, POIs, administrative boundaries worldwide under ODbL 1.0. No government publishes this with global consistency.
Research and Citation Provenance (Global)
Crossref, arXiv, and NBER
Crossref maps 160 million DOIs to authors, journals, and citations under CC0. arXiv carries 2.5 million preprints across physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative finance, and 4 more archives. NBER provides US recession dates from 1854 and the latest preprints feed. Together they ground machine reasoning in checkable sources.
Telecom, Internet Health and Routing (Global)
IODA, RIPE Atlas, RIPEstat, and Tor Metrics
IODA at Georgia Tech detects internet outages by triangulating BGP, active probing, and dark-net data. RIPE Atlas runs network probes across the global internet. RIPEstat surfaces BGP, ASN, RPKI, and WHOIS data. Tor Metrics (Tor Project) tracks the global Tor relay network. Together they form an observability layer for internet health.
Climate, Weather, and Marine Data (Global)
Open-Meteo, Open-Meteo Marine, Open-Meteo Air Quality, Open-Meteo extensions, and OWID CO2
Open-Meteo for weather, forecasts, marine conditions, and air quality. Extensions add GloFAS flood forecasts, CMIP6 climate projections to 2050, and storm surge sea-level data. OWID CO2 from Our World in Data carries 50,000 rows covering 254 entities from 1750 to 2024 under CC BY 4.0.
Knowledge Graphs and Attention (Global)
Wikidata and Wikipedia Pageviews
Wikidata is the structured knowledge graph behind Wikipedia - tens of millions of entities with cross-references between identifiers, corporate metadata, geographic features, and cultural assets, under CC0. Wikipedia Pageviews from the Wikimedia Foundation provides per-article view counts as an attention proxy across 300+ language editions and 7+ years of history.
Reference Datasets (Global)
Our World in Data, Fama-French, Multpl, and REST Countries
Our World in Data curates 63 datasets across health, climate, poverty, democracy, growth, food security, and technology under CC BY 4.0. Fama-French (Dartmouth Tuck School) publishes the canonical factor return series used in academic finance. Multpl aggregates long-running US market metrics like S&P 500 PE ratio and dividend yield with decades of history. REST Countries provides reference data for every nation - capital, population, languages, currencies, calling codes.
Maritime Activity and Trade (Global)
Global Fishing Watch and Trade Alert
Global Fishing Watch monitors vessel activity, fishing events, and Exclusive Economic Zone enforcement using satellite data and AIS positioning. Global Trade Alert (St. Gallen Endowment) tracks 30,000+ state trade-policy interventions since 2008 across 74 intervention types, color-coded red/amber/green for harmfulness, under CC BY 4.0.