By Bill Lucia
Route Fifty
Philadelphia is upgrading some of its open data offerings.
Officials at the Office of Innovation & Technology said the city would be working with the Seattle-based cloud software company Socrata, to provide a new visualization tool, automatic updates for some datasets, and other features meant to improve the quality of data releases and make downloads easier.
Marcus Louie, who leads a Socrata services team in Washington, D.C., emphasized that the company’s work with the city would augment an existing open data portal, OpenDataPhilly. “They’re using Socrata to really enhance the offering that they already have in OpenDataPhilly, kind of broadening the reach that Philadelphia can have with their data, so it’s not just the technical users that are using it,” he said during an interview on Thursday.
What Louie described fits with an open data strategic plan Philadelphia released last October.
The plan highlighted the need to make data more accessible to the general public, in addition to tech-savvy users.
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