The Japanese government published a list of the 1,945 most commonly-used basic kanji in 1981 and is freely available. This database contains 27 seperate descriptions (cells) of each basic Japanese kanji which cover such fields as classification, frequency of use, number of strokes, pronunciation, etc.
The KANJIDIC2 dictionary files licensed from The Electronic Dictionary Research and Development Group under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike v3.0 licence.
Sentence examples compiled by Professor Yasuhito Tanaka at Hyogo University and his students are available under a Creative Commons Attribution (France) v2.0 licence.