Page 51 - GCN, Oct/Nov 2016

The 10-month-old Com- merce Data Service worked with internal agencies on the initial guides, but now the project is a public/private partnership with companies and academia. Esri, Microsoft and Columbia University have produced tutorials to show how they use Commerce data. The data analytics organization Earth Genome, for example, posted a tutorial on using open environmental data for business investment decisions.
By sharing not just open data but open knowledge, CDUP levels the development playing field.
“In my mind, there is a dif- ference between data being open and data being usable,” said Star Ying, a data scientist at Commerce. “People assume that by fulfilling the former they automatically fulfill the latter. By making federal data more usable, we increase both usage of that data and quality of the data insights derived.”
— Stephanie Kanowitz
A cornerstone
of government transparency gets an overhaul
The Office of Management and Budget’s federal IT Dashboard was rebuilt to be faster, cheaper and more user-centric
The seven-year-old federal IT Dashboard, a portal through which the public can see how the government handles its $83 billion IT portfolio, got some much-needed TLC last year.
The dashboard didn’t always align with govern-
ment policy on information transparency, it was difficult to maintain, and it suffered from slow updates to the application programming in- terface, among other things. So the Office of Management and Budget’s Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) rebuilt the applica- tion, data platform and back- end architecture, and data handling.
As a result, the system
has gone from four serv-
ers to one, which reduces maintenance costs, and the dashboard has taken on a RESTful web architecture with a responsive design for a variety of user devices.
An open-source technology
stack that includes Apache, PHP, AngularJS, Twitter Bootstrap, SQL/MySQL and RESTful APIs gives autho- rized users programmatic access to any data available to them on the website. The dashboard also uses NoSQL data constructs in a central warehouse for better perfor- mance on data rendering and analytics.
In addition, the dashboard now boasts a user-centric design — a welcome change, judging by the 60 percent increase in page views compared to the same time last year. It was also built with an eye on the future: The new system can support continuous modular capacity
CRACKING OPEN CENSUS DATA
CitySDK’s open-source tools make it easier for users to build apps with Census data
The Census Bureau’s job is not only to collect data on the nation’s residents and economy, but also to share that information with the public so it can be used to help guide policymakers, inform research and support businesses.
It sounds straightforward, but finding ways to provide the information in useful formats has been challenging.
CitySDK was conceived as a productivity tool for developers to use Census’ three main application programming interfaces, which access statistics, geocoding and geographic shapefiles for mapping. It speeds development time by 75 percent, taking what develop- ers used to spend 10 to 12 hours on and enabling them to knock it out in three or four.
With CitySDK, Census officials wanted to provide access to the data as quickly as pos- sible, create interoperability between datasets and offer a toolbox for developers, said Jeff Meisel, the bureau’s chief marketing officer.
Making it easy for developers to build software with the bureau’s data means they can “start a company...or build a civic tech application or social good application,” he said.
A single developer spent 12 weeks on CitySDK before releasing a JavaScript library in June 2015. Since then, the bureau has been working with the open-source community and the Commerce Department’s Data Service on the second version, which runs on Amazon’s cloud and supports any programming language, not just JavaScript.
That cooperative approach proved crucial because it was Census’ first open-source project. “Co-creating with the community and bringing the citizens directly into the de- sign process [have] been really instrumental in this project being a success,” Meisel said.
— Stephanie Kanowitz
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