4 ms·

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

by jhowell 12y ago

Twirrim 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    I stand corrected. Great to hear there are some good alternatives out there :)

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

by jhowell 12y ago

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 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 12y ago
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 12y ago
  I stand corrected. Great to hear there are some good alternatives out there :)