The majority of open data portals online today are confined to information from a single city government or political jurisdiction. For researchers, policymakers, or other data portal users, this can create problems: we know that urban landscapes are complex, interconnected places that do not exist within the bounds of a single government entity. What if, say, I want to see a map of recent traffic accidents in Manhattan, and understand if weather conditions have an effect? Or what if I want to see if there’s a connection in Chicago between sanitation complaints and environmental inspections?
Finding the answers to such questions is not an easy one; it would require looking at datasets from the City of New York and NOAA, and the City of Chicago and Cook County, respectively. Each question requires an awkward compare-and-contrast between data from separate government portals. What’s a researcher to do? Continue>>>
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