Around the world, governments are opening access to public data sets. The United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and even Kenya have open data portals. States such as Oregon, Utah and Illinois do as well.
These portals allow the public to find, download and use machine-readable data sets generated by the government. Indeed, the US’s data.gov now provides access to thousands of data sets.
New York City is also emerging as a leader. Mayor Bloomberg’s NYC BigApps 3.0 competition is currently underway. The contest offers $50,000 in cash and other prizes for the best new apps that use more than 800 New York City data sets to make government more transparent and improve “the daily lives of New York City residents and visitors.”
Open data initiatives have produced a myriad of innovations. We can locate superfund sites or visualize the health of our communities. New York City commuters access and update real-time subway, bus and driving conditions. San Francisco drivers locate open parking spaces and their cost. Baltimore’s 311 mobile app enables citizens to receive or share crisis data during natural disasters and to report the locations of pot holes, graffiti or broken streetlights. In the United Kingdom, the government is publishing data including every contract and item of government spending over £25,000.
In the meantime, New York State lags miserably. Interested citizens, researchers and entrepreneurs who seek financial data from the Comptroller’s Office or student performance data from the State Education Department, for example, will find themselves confronted with machine-inaccessible formats, such as PDF. Because the data provided is not machine-readable or linked, it has significantly diminished utility.
In New York State, access to data is limited, citizens are in the dark, researchers are frustrated and app developers go elsewhere. There is an alternative.
Free and open access to data:
- Spurs innovation and economic development
- Increases government transparency and accountability
- Reduces waste and fraud
- Improves our quality of life
- Strengthens our democracy.
Governor Cuomo, there is a compelling ethical, civic and economic case for New York State to provide access to high-value, machine-readable public data sets.
Please, free the data.
Respectfully,
Sean Brady, President, Prism Decision Systems, LLC
John Sipple, Associate Professor, Cornell University & Director, New York State Center for Rural Schools
Sean Brady says
Kevin, interesting. We will be in touch.
You will be interested to know that we received an email from a Binghamton Press reader who pointed out that state education department data is available in an Access database, so what’s all the fuss? We suggested the writer visit New York City’s open data portal: http://nycopendata.socrata.com/
There data can be accessed in the following formats:
CSV
JSON
PDF
RDF
RSS
XLS
XLSX
XML
We pointed out that the JSON, RDF and XML formats allow the transmission of structured data over a network, making the data available to Web and mobile apps through web services (i.e., interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network). Open data portals, such as New York City’s, enable researchers and apps to access open, structured data in real time…not something you can do with NYSED’s one-off, annual, zipped-up school report card Microsoft Access database.
Kevin Merritt says
Sean & John,
Thank you for writing your letter to Governor Cuomo. It’s important that every city, county, state and federal government release as much data as possible.
Governor Cuomo and other readers might not recognize that many of the Open Data portals you mention in your post are powered by the cloud-based Socrata Open Data Platform – Oregon, NYC, Illinois, NYC Comptroller’s Office. Besides those you mention, many other states (Maryland, Washington, Hawaii, Oklahoma), most major cities and even foreign governments like the Country of Kenya have found Socrata to be a quick-to-implement, cost-effective solution for creating an Open Data portal for the residents of their jurisdiction. All of these governments are seeing reduced core government service delivery costs and improved citizen engagement.
Explore http://www.socrata.com and/or contact us if you’d like to explore this more deeply for the State of NY.
Kevin Merritt
Founder & CEO
Socrata
Sean Brady says
A version of this blog post was also published as a Guest Viewpoint in the Ithaca Journal, The Binghamton Press and Sun-Bulletin and the Elmira Star-Gazette on February 14, 2012.