NY State “Open NY” Open Data Initiative Publishes July Update, Director Retires

In July, Barb Cohn, the State’s Chief Data Officer and head of the Open NY open data program retired from her job at the New York State Office of Information Technology Services. Cohn has not been replaced but she left behind an admirable track record of meeting public reporting deadlines, publishing hundreds of new agency data sets and emphasizing high quality data. (According to ITS, the agency is actively recruiting for the position of NYS Chief Data Officer.)

Before she left, Cohn published Open NY’s July quarterly update, which highlights new public health and transportation data sets.

Highlights from the July Open NY Quarterly report:

• Data is available across ten categories, and includes 1,454 data sets. (data.ny.gov launched on March 11, 2013 with 244 data sets.)
• Open NY has implemented a Local Data Index, which allows users to search every data set at once for information related to a city or county, depending on the data set.
• Data.ny.gov has been accessed in over 200 countries and territories, all 50 States and Washington D.C., and over 12,000 cities worldwide – including over 8,000 U.S. cities.

The quarterly update also spotlights the Open NY Dataset Submission Guideline, which tells agencies how to format data for public use. We previously complimented the Guidelines here. As we said when it was released in May, the Guideline may well be the best of its kind in the United States.