NYC Council Speaker Christine Quinn, and Councilmember and open data bill sponsor, Gale Brewer congratulated NYC DOITT and the Bloomberg administration for posting more than 1000 raw data sets on the NYC Open Data Portal. Advocates joined the applause, and expressed appreciation at the city’s efforts to fulfill the spirit of the March 7th, 2013 deadline for posting all data already on city websites in the city’s open data portal or explaining why this wasn’t possible.
Since the signing of Local Law 11 last March, DoITT has worked with agencies citywide to add more than 350 new data sets to the public inventory available on NYC OpenData, as well as securing regular feeds for updates to existing data sets. In addition to application programming interfaces (APIs) for direct connectivity to data feeds, the NYC OpenData portal offers enhanced browsing and search capabilities allowing users to search by full data set – or by datum within data sets; visualization tools such as maps, charts, and graphs; and discussion forums for user feedback and suggestions. Regular refreshes of data sets are made through the portal, with metadata informing users how often particular data sets will be updated.
NYC Transparency Working Group Statements
“Freedom of information is basic to any successful democracy,” said John Kaehny, nycTWG co-chair and Executive Director of Reinvent Albany. “Data is simply information in a digital form. ‘Open data’ is the way information is freed for broad public use. Today marks a big step towards a new era in which it’s understood that while government is the steward of the information it collects, the public is the rightful owner.”
“Making it easier for the public to access City government databases will make our local agencies more effective and responsive,” said Gene Russianoff, nycTWG co-chair and senior attorney for the New York Public Interest Research Group.