Mayor Emanuel Expands Open Data on City Portal with Executive Order

smartercities:

Today, the City of Chicago expanded its open data efforts with an executive order by Mayor Emanuel.

“An open and transparent administration makes it easier for residents to hold their government accountable, but it also serves as a platform for innovative tools that improve the lives of all residents,” said Mayor Emanuel, in statement on the city website.

“Chicago’s vibrant technology and startup community will leverage this wealth of open, public data to create applications that will improve service delivery and lead to greater quality of service for residents and more public engagement in City government.”

The city released 21 new “high value” datasets today, including real-time traffic data from Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) buses, environmental data, liquor regulation, and recycling programs.

When asked what made these datasets high value, the Mayor’s Office responded via email.

“The datasets released today aren’t necessarily more critical than the more than 400 others that have been released,” wrote Caroline Weisser, a spokesperson for the Mayor’s Office. 

“They continue the commitment the administration has taken to being a leader in municipal open data. The executive order itself codifies the actions that Brett and John Tolva, the CTO, have taken over the past year and a half to pursue both open data policy and detailed analytics in tandem. Making a firm commitment to continue adding writable data to the dataportal about how the city works provides the raw materials for the City to collaborate and innovate with the developer community, which ultimately helps the City do a better job of serving Chicagoans.”

For more context on opening government, the Chicago way, read our feature from 2011 and more recent coverage of how Brett Goldstein, Chicago’s chief information officer and chief data officer, is using data in the public sector.

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Bringing Hidden Healthcare Data Into the Open | Wired Business | Wired.com As anyone who has had the courage to research a sore throat or mystery rash online knows, there is an overabundance of information available to help you try and get a handle on what ails you. What has been missing, however, is easy access to other kinds of medical information that have a direct bearing on healthcare, including a patient’s own medical records, test results, copies of X-rays and MRIs, and how one doctor performs when compared to others in his or her area of expertise. Enter self-described health IT hacktivist and author Fred Trotter, who, with a bit of crowdfunding cash, and a whole lot of patience, has hatched a plan to bring hidden healthcare data into the open.

Bringing Hidden Healthcare Data Into the Open | Wired Business | Wired.com

As anyone who has had the courage to research a sore throat or mystery rash online knows, there is an overabundance of information available to help you try and get a handle on what ails you. What has been missing, however, is easy access to other kinds of medical information that have a direct bearing on healthcare, including a patient’s own medical records, test results, copies of X-rays and MRIs, and how one doctor performs when compared to others in his or her area of expertise. Enter self-described health IT hacktivist and author Fred Trotter, who, with a bit of crowdfunding cash, and a whole lot of patience, has hatched a plan to bring hidden healthcare data into the open.

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WWW inventor: HTML5 will make Minority Report look like child’s play | Silicon Republic

Open data heralds the internet’s next exciting phase

Considered one of the pioneering fathers of the internet, Berners-Lee believes we are only at the dawn of an even more exciting era - the era of open data and the semantic web, where almost every feasible physical device or piece of data will be interlinked online.

“The semantic web vision has taken a long time to come to fruition because the web is so exciting in many other ways,” says Berners-Lee, who has been driving new metadata labelling formats to make everything linkable.

WWW inventor: HTML5 will make Minority Report look like childs play

This brings us on to the next big revolution - open data - and he says governments and businesses are at the forefront of opening up datasets for individuals, citizens and other businesses to make more informed decisions.The future web we are about to see will be one in which data and devices everywhere will be interlinked and metadata is central to this - effectively who owns A or B in the same way individuals own the deeds to their homes but the difference is allowing this data to be usable and open.

He cites the corner boxes you see on Wikipedia, for example, as a case of how databases and datasets can be globally linked.

(read more on Silicon Republic)

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30 Open Data Resources - semanticweb.com Romy Misra has posted a list of thirty places to find open data on the web … Misra starts the list with a few government and political data resources: “Data.gov: This is the  go-to resource for government-related data. It claims to have up to 400,000 data sets, both raw data and geo spatial, in a variety of formats. The only caveat in using the data sets is you have to make sure you clean them, since many have missing values and characters. Socrata is another good place to explore government-related data. One great thing about Socrata is they have some visualization tools that make exploring the data easier.” Find the rest of the list here. Image: Courtesy Flickr/ schoschie

30 Open Data Resources - semanticweb.com

Romy Misra has posted a list of thirty places to find open data on the web …

Misra starts the list with a few government and political data resources: “Data.gov: This is the  go-to resource for government-related data. It claims to have up to 400,000 data sets, both raw data and geo spatial, in a variety of formats. The only caveat in using the data sets is you have to make sure you clean them, since many have missing values and characters. Socrata is another good place to explore government-related data. One great thing about Socrata is they have some visualization tools that make exploring the data easier.”

Find the rest of the list here.

Image: Courtesy Flickr/ schoschie


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NYC Open Data Tumblr

Welcome to the NYC Open Data Tumblr

As part of Mayor Bloomberg’s commitment to transparency and innovation, over 800 (and counting!) City datasets are now online for anyone in New York or around the world to explore and access via an API, for deeper, real-time integration into apps and websites. 

NYC Open Data brings you:

·   City datasets about everything from school test scores to campaign contributions;

·   Documents such as the green project checklists

·   Maps utilizing .gis data showcasing many different sites of interest ranging from public handball courts to street trees

 

 ·   Charts and graphs created dynamically from datasets, such as “Percentage of People Residing in a School District who Receive Public Assistance” and “Birth Rate by Mother’s Age”

  

·       File export options including CSV, JSON, PDF, RDF, RSS, XLS, XLSX, XML in addition to API access and the ability to embed a dataset on blogs or social media platform.

 

We will be frequently updating this Tumblr with interesting data visualizations and news about hackathons and apps that use NYC Open Data. We would love to hear your feedback and suggestions.

via nycopendata:

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opensandiego: We make data about San Diego freely available for anyone to use. Starting Open San Diego has been a lot of fun. It’s exciting to see how quickly our community has grown! The most difficult, and important, work to do in these early days is make ourselves an official non-profit, select a board, and start raising money. It takes time to do it right … Discussions about “open government” and “government 2.0” get extremely confusing extremely quickly. There are countless ways to apply openness and new technology to improve our government, which often ends up leading to countless overlapping conversations. We have to fight hard against this tendency. This is one of the reasons why we focus exclusively on making data more accessible. Our visual identity is part of this too. Our sites should be clean and easy to understand. We’re tackling complicated problems, and we don’t want to further complicate them with confusing and cluttered design. We also want to avoid alienating less web-savvy or technical audiences who have valuable insights and contributions to make.

opensandiego:

We make data about San Diego freely available for anyone to use.

Starting Open San Diego has been a lot of fun. It’s exciting to see how quickly our community has grown!

The most difficult, and important, work to do in these early days is make ourselves an official non-profit, select a board, and start raising money. It takes time to do it right

…

Discussions about “open government” and “government 2.0” get extremely confusing extremely quickly. There are countless ways to apply openness and new technology to improve our government, which often ends up leading to countless overlapping conversations. We have to fight hard against this tendency. This is one of the reasons why we focus exclusively on making data more accessible.

Our visual identity is part of this too. Our sites should be clean and easy to understand. We’re tackling complicated problems, and we don’t want to further complicate them with confusing and cluttered design. We also want to avoid alienating less web-savvy or technical audiences who have valuable insights and contributions to make.

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