
City of Seattle Data Portal - finnn
https://data.seattle.gov/browse
======
bilalq
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.

~~~
ntaylor
Based on [http://data.lacity.org](http://data.lacity.org), I'd say
standardization is in the cards.

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

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

[https://data.edmonton.ca](https://data.edmonton.ca)

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themgt
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/](http://open-source.socrata.com/the-
code/)

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dangayle
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).

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lominming
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.

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

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

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ntaylor
Los Angeles just released the same thing this past weekend:
[http://data.lacity.org](http://data.lacity.org).

~~~
andrewliebchen
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](http://losangeles.opengov.com).

Disclaimer: I'm a designer at OpenGov :)

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dave1010uk
We helped create a data portal for Bournemouth (in the UK):
[http://bournemouthdata.io/](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.

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

~~~
Twirrim
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](http://data.hawaii.gov) ) &
county ( [https://data.honolulu.gov/](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 :)

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

CKAN - [http://ckan.org](http://ckan.org)

OpenDataCatalog - [https://github.com/azavea/Open-Data-
Catalog/](https://github.com/azavea/Open-Data-Catalog/)

Junar - [http://www.junar.com/](http://www.junar.com/)

DKAN - [http://nucivic.com/dkan/](http://nucivic.com/dkan/)

PublishMyData -
[http://www.swirrl.com/publishmydata](http://www.swirrl.com/publishmydata)

CKAN in particular is used by a lot of National Governments (
[http://ckan.org/instances/](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.

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

