International trade data collected through a project led by R. Feenstra. The project website contains descriptions and downloadable archives.
This data was used by Cesar Hidalgo to build his product space database.
The data shows statistics about traded commodities between world-wide countries, as tracked by the UN.
The data covers the years 1962-2000, with the last update to the site in 2009. The format of the files is something non-standard, binary. The whole database seems deprecated.
Since the data was originally based on the UN Comtrade database, which is still alive, active and complies with the current standards, the later should be used. See the UN Comtrade analysis here