Launching the Wolfram Data Repository: Data Publishing that Really Works—Stephen Wolfram Blog

From the conclusion of an extensive overview of an amazing data resource

"Many things have had to come together to make today’s launch of the Wolfram Data Repository possible. In the modern software world it’s easy to build something that takes blobs of data and puts them someplace in the cloud for people to access. But what’s vastly more difficult is to have the data actually be immediately useful—and making that possible is what’s required the whole development of our Wolfram Language and Wolfram Cloud technology stack, which are now the basis for the Wolfram Data Repository.
But now that the Wolfram Data Repository exists—and private versions of it can be set up—there are lots of new opportunities. For the research community, the most obvious is finally being able to do genuine data-backed publication, where one can routinely make underlying data from pieces of research available in a way that people can actually use. There are variants of this in education—making data easy to access and use for educational exercises and projects.
In the corporate world, it’s about making data conveniently available across an organization. And for individuals, it’s about maintaining data in such a way that it can be readily used for computation, and built on."

Launching the Wolfram Data Repository: Data Publishing that Really Works—Stephen Wolfram Blog