Page 48 - GCN, May 2017
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case study   TRANSPARENCY
Boston puts open-data
quality first
The new Analyze Boston website offers readily accessible datasets for internal and external audiences to use as they see fit
BY STEPHANIE KANOWITZ
Boston’s new cloud-hosted open-data website, Analyze Boston, focuses on making data usable and accessible, not just available. That’s why officials didn’t simply move all their datasets from the previous portal to the new one.
“We want to make the site into a place where people can go to get infor- mation and knowledge, not just data,” said Andrew Therriault, Boston’s chief data officer.
To figure out what data to release, the city formed a Content Advisory Group of internal and external stakeholders to “really help us dig us through what is a good dataset and what should be made public,” said Howard Lim, prod- uct manager for Analyze Boston.
A high-quality dataset has two re- quirements, he added, and one is “making a connection between the data publisher and the data consumer by providing metadata.” However, “high- quality also means datasets are up-to- date and readily accessible and really convey the time frame for when a data- set is relevant.”
When Analyze Boston was released in March in beta form, it had 117 da- tasets — fewer than the previous por- tal. But Therriault said that total is misleading because his team combined multiple datasets on the same topic but from different time periods into a single dataset when moving the information from the old site to the new one. For
example, employee earnings reports used to be in separate datasets for each year. Now they’re separate files in the same dataset.
Powered by OpenGov’s Open Data platform and hosted in the cloud, An- alyze Boston also improves on users’ ability to create applications based on the data. Although the previous portal offered an application programming in-
terface, users said it wasn’t responsive enough, and the data was sometimes inconsistent in terms of timeliness and completeness, Therriault said.
“We are really investing in mak- ing sure that the data we’re publish- ing there has a long-term plan to be sustained and in a consistent fashion, where people can know that it’s going to be available and be up-to-date when
The Traffic Crash Map above is part of the Vision Zero Boston initiative to eliminate fatal and serious traffic accidents in the city by 2030. It is just one example of the ways in which people are putting the city’s open data to use.
44 GCN MAY 2017 • GCN.COM
CITYOFBOSTON.GOV/VISIONZERO


















































































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