City of Seattle Data Portal | Hacker News Reader

City of Seattle Data Portal

data.seattle.gov

59 pointsfinnn21 comments

As a Seattle resident, I'm pretty excited to see this. There's a lot of interesting data here, but it seems that very little of it is available through an API[1]. Still, I imagine this will improve with time.

There are a lot of cities trending towards making information like this more easily accessible. It'd be even better if there was some form of standardization between cities though.

If you're interested in working with this data, you should come to the next Code for Seattle meetup: http://codeforseattle.org/

Based on http://data.lacity.org, I'd say standardization is in the cards.

In this case, both projects appear to have been produced by Socrata.

They also produced the City of Edmonton one - the icons and functionality appears exactly the same:

https://data.edmonton.ca

Wow. This is done very well. Bravo to Seattle, a model for how other's should do open government data.

You can get at most of the data via Socrata's API, it's just not necessarily clear how. This new documentation from Socrata helps, though: http://dev.socrata.com/

> It'd be even better if there was some form of standardization between cities though.

ISO standards were just agreed on, in fact.

http://www.citylab.com/politics/2014/06/finally-clear-perfor...

It's a fairly sad and ironic the way Socrata and some others in the open gov space are building proprietary/closed source products. Socrata has of course talked up their "Open Data Server, Community Edition" which they announced over 18 months ago and still has essentially zero documentation of how to even run or deploy the thing:

http://open-source.socrata.com/the-code/

The problem with the Socrata stuff is that it is garbage in, garbage out.

Case in point, my hackathon group helped hook them up with our city and our entire event was based on hacking this data. But the city basically did some straight sql table dumps without normalizing everything (so you would have to query multiple sets of data to make sense of anything) AND the city redacted a bunch of data, like I dunno, the frikkin relational IDs of some of the really juicy data, making it effectively worthless.

Socrata is in such a land grab that it appears that they're not too interested in whether or not the data is any good. They just take what the gov'ts give them and dump it in.

Maybe they've fixed that a bit since, but it was highly annoying at the time (last fall I think).

My first impression: "Wow. Those icons looks very Metro like Windows 8." Then, I realized the data is about City of Seattle, then it all makes sense. Regardless, good job on the city part. Providing data provides potential for the public to make more sense of them. New and interesting solutions or tidbits can be discovered from the public. I can see students playing with the data for their research papers.

Seattle is not part of Redmond, which is where Microsoft is. But probably a fair number of MS employees in the city.

And Seattle and Redmond are both in King County, whose Metro transit signs inspired the "Metro" interface in the first place.

> But probably a fair number of MS employees in the city.

Quite a lot. Enough in fact that they have a set of private bus routes to various districts of the city. Though people don't protest them to nearly the same volume as they do in SF.

Los Angeles just released the same thing this past weekend: http://data.lacity.org.

Los Angeles's OpenGov site is much more attractive, and at least when it comes to city finances, more immediately useful. http://losangeles.opengov.com.

Disclaimer: I'm a designer at OpenGov :)

We helped create a data portal for Bournemouth (in the UK): http://bournemouthdata.io/

It's a long way off the likes of Seattle and data.gov.uk, but it's a huge step forwards in terms on openness. It's great seeing cities start to make this data available and people coming up with interesting ideas to use the data.

It's called Socrata and I think they are posting these city data projects.

Socrata contract with local government and cities to host data, they have a number of cities and states on board. I bumped into them when I was living & working in Hawaii for an egovernment company. They started providing open data for both the state ( http://data.hawaii.gov ) & county ( https://data.honolulu.gov/ )

This is an area for which it seems like there are very few competing products, and from my experiences with it in the past it's a very easy and intuitive product for non-technical users. IIRC it can take things like Excel spreadsheets and handle all the import and arranging for them.

The ease of use was certainly a big sell for the agencies in Hawaii. They're already typically understaffed and dealing with lots of red tape, the last thing they want is to have to fight with a system to get data out. As with anything, if you make it hard for people, most won't bother.

If HN people are looking for a market to compete in, this one might be interesting :)

There are already a few other data portals, and some of them (unlike Socrata) are Open Source.

CKAN - http://ckan.org

OpenDataCatalog - https://github.com/azavea/Open-Data-Catalog/

Junar - http://www.junar.com/

DKAN - http://nucivic.com/dkan/

PublishMyData - http://www.swirrl.com/publishmydata

CKAN in particular is used by a lot of National Governments ( http://ckan.org/instances/ ) , is Open Source, has a reasonably large developer community. It also isn't quite as expensive as some of the closed source commercial offerings.

There are a few more but in various stages of completion/usefulness.

Disclaimer: CKAN dev.

I stand corrected. Great to hear there are some good alternatives out there :)

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