City of San Francisco Data Portal

data.sfgov.org

27 points·yayitswei··5 comments

There's a lot of powerful things you can do just in their interface. I heard a Ted talk recently that suggested there is a lot of hard to find datasets with lots of valuable information out there just waiting to be untapped. There are several non-profit and even business use cases.

How does this compare to OpenGov's offering?

This looks like another Socrata-based offering. Socrata allows cities to dump their datasets online for consumption. Certainly this makes the data more available than ever before, but it doesn't do much to help the ordinary citizen parse and understand their own city.

OpenGov on the other hand, consumes city financial information, organizes and visualizes it in such a way that anyone can easily explore and understand their city's finances. Socrata's great if you want to get an RSS feed of all the parking tickets issued in your city; OpenGov's great if you want to actually see how your city is spending your tax dollars.

Disclaimer: I'm a designer at OpenGov :)

I've used some of their data for tracking and visualizing locations of methamphetamine-related incidents in the city:

http://keithflower.org/welcome/default/meth_timemap

It is... annoying that the viewport width changes both the range of dates that you're looking at and the center of that date range.

Otherwise, it looks like a decent toy project.

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