2/4/2015 College Station making more public data available online The Eagle: Local News
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College Station making more publicdata available online
Posted: Thursday, January 29, 2015 12:00 am
By Emily Wilkins [email protected] |0 comments
College Station data on everything from potholes toshuttle transit routes to where crimes are committed willbe made more accessible to the public in the nextseveral years.
Currently, much of College Station's civil data must beobtained through a request to the city. The open datainitiative would make such information, including maps
and police daily activity logs, easier for residents and app developers to access, said Councilman James Benham.
"With the citizens actually being able to write applications themselves, they can help the city solve problems wemight not even know we have because we haven't datamined that information," he said.
Dozens of larger metropolitan areas including New York, Portland and San Francisco have opened large amountsof public data online in the last several years. Some city governments have taken it a step further, offering prizesand incentives for developers to create applications to make the data more userfriendly to the public.
Ben Roper, director of Information Technology for College Station, said it's too early to know how much the projectwill cost or how long it will take to complete. Costs in other cities have ranged from $20,000 to $100,000.
Some of the data is already available on College Station's website, but is scattered in various places or is not easyto access, Roper said.
"There's a lot of data that's collected for various reasons," he said. "Any way we can turn that around and make thatavailable for citizens for transparency purposes or help them in finding information is a good thing."
At last Thursday's council meeting, the College Station City Council expressed an interest in moving forward withthe open data initiative in the next fiscal year, which begins in October.
"You've heard from the council that we're excited about this," said Mayor Nancy Berry during the council meeting,"And we hope to see this in our future budget."
Only about 15 percent of cities with populations of between 100,000 and 500,000 have posted data online thatdevelopers can build off of, according to data complied from the U.S. Census Bureau by Mark Headd, a programerwho served as the first chief data officer for Philadelphia.
But it doesn't surprise Tracy Hammond, a professor at the A&M Department of Computer Science and Engineering,that College Station is one of the first smaller cities to take on such an initative. She said the data will give herstudents another resource to build on, helping them immensely.
"You have a huge university here," she said. "We have the brain power of a much larger city. I'm not surprisedwe're on the forefront."
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Learn moreCollege Station's website: cstx.gov
US census bureau data on Mark Headd:www.codeforamerica.org/blog/2014/10/14/smallandmidsizedcitiesthenextfrontierinopendata/
2/4/2015 College Station making more public data available online The Eagle: Local News
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2/4/2015 College Station making more public data available online The Eagle: Local News
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