Chicago opens its doors with data, invites programmers in

The download's upside

10/26/2011 10:00 PM

By ALMA BAHMAN
Medill News Service

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Chicago is pulling back the digital data curtains, publishing hundreds of sets of official data, and enlisting the help of program developers to make the information useful to the rest of us.

Last year, the city began publishing charts, maps, documents and lots of city-related data on its Data Portal website. Material was added slowly at first, but new information is being changed, updated or added almost daily.

Earlier this year, the city launched Apps for Metro Chicago, a contest that asked the public to team up with program developers to make life in Chicago better through data. Contestants created mobile applications using any of the hundreds of datasets available at the city, county and state level.

Elizabeth Park, winner of the community round, pulled from the 654 datasets on Chicago’s Data Portal for her app, IFindIt Chicago. The Android app connects low-income and homeless families with resources like food pantries, medical care and shelters.

“I designed it for a mom with three kids at a bus stop,” Park said. “I looked at all the datasets from the city of Chicago and started scraping.”

IFindIt Chicago lists women, infant and children’s centers, community health clinics and farmer’s markets that accept food stamps in the city. Park and her team won $5,000 from the contest and an additional $2,000 from the state of Illinois.

Apps for Metro Chicago is touted as the first of its kind and, as web developer Paul Weinstein hopes, is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what developers can do with city data. Weinstein, who works for Orbit Media Studios, first got involved with Chicago’s open data project in July.

He attended the Google-sponsored Hackathon, an event where developers interested in using city data could come together to start playing and writing programs.

Weinstein is currently working on an interface for developers who want to access the Chicago Data Portal. They can use his prewritten code, written in PHP, to pull information they need.

“They can just worry about, ‘What data do I want and what do I want to do with that data?’” he said.

There aren’t any live products using his interface yet, but there are a few in the idea-phase. “This is all relatively new,” Weinstein said.

Utilizing local programmers also helps develop Chicago’s reputation as a high-tech hub.

“Chicago is not considered at the forefront of technological development, so the city can help foster that,” Weinstein said. “It allows people to take a second look at Chicago and say, ‘Well maybe I’m not going to pick up and go to San Francisco and work there.’”

“They’re pushing the envelope on what kind of data they’re releasing,” said Chris Metcalf, referring to Chicago’s September release of crime statistics.

Metcalf, director of product development at Seattle-based Socrata, said Chicago is leading the way in innovation of open data at the city level. Socrata is the software platform that runs the Chicago’s Data Portal.

As more government information becomes available, programmers will have more opportunities to break it down and make it digestible for Chicagoans. But it’s going to be a slow process.

“This is something that’s new for lots of cities, but certainly for Chicago,” Weinstein said. “There’s certainly going to be lots of bright ideas that are two or three years down the road.”

Park’s advice to other developers tackling the same task is: “Start with the problem you’re trying to solve, don’t try to solve the world.”


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