“Data” and “data journalism” are buzz words of the moment and many individuals, organisations and sites are using data in different ways and working out the best ways interesting information can be used and presented.

You know ‘its’ going on, you want to get involved but you have no idea what data you’re looking for or where to start in finding it. That’s where Get the Data comes in. This new Q&A site built by Rufus Pollock allows you to ask questions such as:

• “where to find data relating to a particular issue;
• “how to query Linked Data sources to get just the data set you require;
• “what tools to use to explore a data set in a visual way;
• “how to cleanse data or get it into a format you can work with using third party visualisation or analysis tools.”

The site encourages users to ask questions, respond to others, tag questions with keywords, comment on and vote for the questions of others. Its clear that the aim is to build up a real community amongst users like sites such as Quora and users’ contributions are encouraged with the prospect of earning ‘badges’ for highly voted questions or answers. 

There’s already lots of interesting questions and useful answers on the site such as Is UK Local Government Spending Data from different councils being aggregated in any queryable way?

So if you want to use data but have never done so before or are unsure about where you could find what you’re looking for, log on, post a question and see if someone else can help!