NYS Open Data Keeps Chugging Along

While Reinvent Albany has been very critical of the governor’s overall record on transparency, we continue to appreciate the progress his administration has made with his Open NY open data initiative. Open NY was established by Executive Order 95 in March 2013. Since its creation, Open NY has managed to put a premium on data quality while still publishing large volumes of useful data and meeting deadlines to publish regular quarterly updates.

These updates, published every quarter, help maintain momentum and show the public how much progress Open NY is making with agency data. The OpenNY team at NYS ITS published the January quarterly update on the state’s open data portal this week. The biggest takeaway from the quarterly report is that New York State open data remains centered around the State Health Department. SDOH has published more than half of all state datasets.

Highlights from this Open NY Quarterly report:

• Agencies added 33 new data sets in the last quarter, for a total of 1,526 state data sets published since launch.
• The State Health Department has published 514 datasets, more than one-third of all total state datasets.
• The number of data catalog items has increased 525% since data.ny.gov launched on March 11, 2013 with 244 data sets.
• Open NY has again increased the number of data sets browsable via Socrata’s Data Lens feature.
• Data sets were updated over 2,000 times in the previous quarter.
• Data.ny.gov has been accessed in over 200 countries and territories, all 50 States and Washington D.C., and over 14,200 cities worldwide.

The report also promises a new feature called the Dataset Primer Page, which will be “the future default experience for every tabular dataset in the catalog.” Ultimately, this will make datasets and their filtered views more discoverable than the default Socrata experience.