New Visualization Tool Will Augment Existing Open Data Portal in Philadelphia
Philadelphia City Hall, at left, in Center City. artemis_lady / Shutterstock.com
The city is also looking to automatically update more datasets.
Philadelphia is upgrading some of its open data offerings.
On Thursday, officials at the Office of Innovation & Technology said the city would be working with the Seattle-based cloud software company Socrata, to provide a new visualization tool, automatic updates for some datasets, and other features meant to improve the quality of data releases and make downloads easier.
Marcus Louie, who leads a Socrata services team in Washington, D.C., emphasized that the company’s work with the city would augment an existing open data portal, OpenDataPhilly. “They’re using Socrata to really enhance the offering that they already have in OpenDataPhilly, kind of broadening the reach that Philadelphia can have with their data, so it’s not just the technical users that are using it,” he said during an interview on Thursday.
What Louie described fits with an open data strategic plan Philadelphia released last October.
The plan highlighted the need to make data more accessible to the general public, in addition to tech-savvy users.
OpenDataPhilly has been around for about four years. The site launched in 2011 and is run by the local technology community, not managed by the city. It does, however, provide the official repository for Philadelphia’s open data, and for other datasets from local organizations that are not city-run.
Tim Wisniewski, Philadelphia’s chief data officer, said that apart from the new visualization feature, users would probably not notice big changes to how the data portal works or feels.
“The end user, the public, will still browse OpenDataPhilly the same way they have been,” he said.
Helping departments keep data up to date automatically was another need identified in the strategic plan. Even using Socrata’s technology, preparing a dataset for automatic updates can be time consuming.
“It does take extra work,” Wisniewski said. But, “the nice part is,” he added, “we do it once, we set it up, and we turn on the automation.” After that, the online, publicly available version of the data is refreshed at set intervals with little work on the part of any city staff.
As it stands, this is not the case with most open data in Philidelphia. Of the 171 datasets the city currently publishes, 13 are refreshed automatically. The rest require manual updates.
Asked if he could think of any published datasets that might benefit from automatic updates, Wisniewski pointed to bicycle-theft data, which was initially released about three years ago.
Wisniewski recalled getting requests for bicycle-theft data updates during his earlier days with the city. “There was no process in place to keep it refreshed, and so people would literally just tweet me, or send an email asking, ‘hey, can we have a refresh,” he said. “I’d have to figure out who was it at the police department that helped me with this.”
“That’s an example of one where we should really automate this, so that we don’t ever have to ask for a refresh again,” Wisniewski added.
For other cities considering whether to implement automatic updates, Socrata’s Louie recommends starting out with one, or a few, datasets.
“When we’ve seen success, is when people can start with the process slowly,” he said.
According to Wisniewski, Philadelphia is paying Socrata about $30,000 annually for the services the company is providing.
The city unveiled the new visualization tool with a freshly published parking violation dataset, which includes about 4.8 million rows of information. By simply clicking a link, users can browse charts showing information such as when tickets were issued and violation descriptions. They can also view maps that display violations by ZIP code and census tract.
Five Philadelphia transportation agencies have recently published a total of 17 new datasets, including airport parking availability, crash data, and the city’s 2015 street paving plan.
The release of the datasets coincides with the Apps for Philly Transportation 2015 hackathon, which will take place this weekend.
“We’re really interested in what people are going to do with this stuff,” Wisniewski said. “I’m sure we’ll see some really neat visualizations, or even applications, built around some of these 17 datasets that went out. That will be exciting.”
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