Data, data, data. There's loads of it out there and more coming your way as governments open their statistics vaults around the world.

First the US with data.gov, then Australia and New Zealand followed suit. Now it's the UK's turn with data.gov.uk.

And that's in addition to the cities and US states that have made government data available too: London launched very recently - you can get the full set of links for government data sites around the world here.

Ever since the government appointed Sir Tim Berners-Lee as its open data Czar (working with Prof Nigel Shadbolt from Southampton University) it was obvious the issue was going to be big for the government, but what does it mean for you?

You now have tens of sites around the world providing you access, but how do you find them?

Well, this is now the place. To coincide with the launch of data.gov.uk, we have created the ultimate gateway to world government data.

At World Government Data you can:

• Search government data sites from the UK, USA, Australia, New Zealand and London (this comes under United Kingdom, if you want to browse) in one place and download the data (more sites to come)

• Help us find the best dataset by ranking them

• Collect similar datasets together from around the world

• Browse all datasets by each country

It's all been put together with the help of developer Ben Firshman and is the culmination of our year-long project to make data widely available to everyone.

And, even better, we have an API available. Even though all of these government data sites have enormous quantities of data, they are not in the same formats. What we have done is put them into a unified form, meaning developers have the opportunity to write applications that compare data between different countries. If you want the data in Atom or JSON just change the "/search" to "/search.atom" or "/search.json" in the url. There will be full documentation on this soon. Watch this space.

The whole project is only going to increase in size and scope. As Ben Fry has said: "This is only going one way: there is no trend towards less data"

Can you do something with this data?

• Go straight to our World Government Data search

• Gallery: the full list of government data sites

• Gallery: the top 10 best visualisations and apps

Flickr Please post your visualisations and mash-ups on our Flickr group or mail us at datastore@guardian.co.uk

• Get the A-Z of data

• More at the Datastore directory

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