Open NY Quarterly Updates Report on State Open Data Progress

January 15, 2016

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New York State’s Open NY open data initiative continues to make great progress. Open data advocates note that Governor Cuomo’s open data initiative published its January quarterly update on the state’s open data portal last week. The Open NY team remain committed to supporting the new open data culture within state 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. The Open NY team and the NYS Department of Health continue to publish new public health and health cost data that is very useful to industry, journalists, academics and public interest groups. In addition, the Department of Transportation and the Thruway Authority have provided high-quality data in the latest update.

Open data supporters are eager to see Open NY focus its efforts on a single agency—perhaps the DEC—with the goal of following-up the open data success of the award-winning Health Department. Stakeholder groups hope 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 this Open NY Quarterly report:

  • Data is available across ten categories, and includes 1,339 data sets.
  • The number of data catalog items has increased 449% since data.ny.gov launched on March 11, 2013 with 244 data sets.
  • Open NY has increased the number of data sets browsable via Socrata’s Data Lens feature.
  • Data.ny.gov has been accessed in over 200 countries and territories, all 50 States and WashingtonD.C., and over 11,000 cities worldwide – including over 8,000 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.