Sometimes, something as seemingly routine as publishing a government quarterly important are important. Open data advocates were happy to see that Governor Cuomo’s Open NY, open data initiative, recently published its July quarterly update on the state’s open data portal, data.ny.gov. The Open NY team is working to establish, and sustain, a new open data culture within government. The quarterly public updates help maintain momentum and accountability and allow the public to see what kind of progress Open NY is making.
The good news here is that the report reveals that Open NY has been making solid progress. In particular, the Open NY team and the State DOH continue to publish new public health and health cost data that is very useful to industry, journalists, academics and public interest groups.
Open data supporters are eager to see Open NY help another agency — perhaps DEC — achieve the open data success of the award winning Health Department. Stakeholder groups would also like to see the Open NY team and state agencies use Freedom of Information Law request logs to identify what agency data should be published.
Highlights from Open NY Quarterly report:
- Data is available across ten categories, and includes 796 data sets, and more than 60 million records.
- The number of data catalog items has more than doubled since data.ny.gov launched on March 11, 2013 with 244 data sets.
- A new Developer Resources beta page was released on March 19, 2014, and includes code samples to facilitate data mashups.
- Data.ny.gov has been accessed in over 160 countries, all 50 States and over 6,500 cities worldwide – including over 5,000 U.S. cities.
The quarterly report also highlights the success of the state’s Open Data Handbook, which was lauded by the National Association of Chief Information Officers as a national best practice. The report also cites the success of a number of civic hackathons or “App Challenges” which have used data from Open NY.