It's a goldmine, there are 350k datasets available, and a lot of them that will not make some people happy (criminality by geographic zone for example).<p>It opens possibilities to create a really nice multi-factor (e.g. crime, pollution, education) "best place to live" application.<p>A lot of the data is available in a very manageable CSV, sadly some is only available in XLS that may be a bit harder to manipulate programmaticaly.
This is a lot more data than I expected for a launch! I guess they wanted to get a lot of stuff organized before going public with it. Looks like some useful data that wasn't previously publicly available (or available under a free-enough license), from some brief skimming. There's some discussion on the French OpenStreetMap list about using it in semi-automated fashion to improve French coverage on OSM, especially for things like landmarks and landforms outside of the major cities, or adding metadata to existing landmark nodes.