Industrial societies today produce abundant data fed by the statistical system, social research, market research and administrative data. This is increasingly complemented by processing data produced from sources like commercial transactions. Looking at societies in an international comparative perspective, however, we find many incoherent patterns or even white spots on the globe. Nevertheless, we can observe encouraging progress over past decades. The pioneers of the data movement worked towards an international network of data infrastructures that were conceived as building blocks in a system of social observation. Gaps in the statistical data base had to be filled by sample surveys from social research. This resulted in a network of social science data services to preserve and process the data collected to make them available for secondary analysis, and systematic efforts to continuously collect data comparative by design and to make them available as a public good to the scientific community at large. Increasingly we can observe a rapprochement that has been taking place between social policy and social research since the turn of the millennium. Facing the challenges of globalisation we cannot however, overlook the fact that in spite of all progress, social science data have been collected predominantly with a national perspective, are not well integrated and – even if they are technically and legally accessible – do not easily lend themselves to comparison between nations or periods of time. International data programmes may well profit from the methodological standardisation and harmonisation of measurements as well as from technical progress towards the easier access to and interoperability of data bases. These processes will profit much, if growing efforts to agree on data policies and funding perspectives for international and transcontinental cooperation succeed.

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