The city of Cincinnati is focusing on open data as the key to becoming a truly smart city. Leigh Tami, the city’s chief performance officer has been assessing available data, how it can be analyzed, and how it can be used to improve the city and measure performance, as well as citizen engagement.
“We have been pulling in data from all over the city, we process it, we normalize it, to make sure we compare apples to apples or oranges to oranges and then we’re automating the publication to our open data portal as well as our Cincy Insights dashboard portal,” Tami said.
Data is analyzed from crime, services, EMS, fire, police, and customer requests for pothole and sidewalk repair, and GPS data from city vehicles such as snowplows and street sweepers. The data is available on dashboards on the city portal, so that private citizens can access it and download it for their own use. The data includes geocodes – the GPS coordinates for a specific location – and other information to make it valuable for analysis. The city now has 16 dashboards after launching the first on December 7, 2016. The dashboards have received 56,000 online visitors since the launch.
“As we started pulling things in and used Tableau, which is our primary visualization tool, I realized we really had something, we could make something really incredible. We could start pulling in all of this data and automate the push for data to us. We have it, we’re working on how to clean it up and do analysis with it. We’re working toward the capability to do some really cool stuff with this,” stated Tami. “Something we do with all of our data is we normalize the addresses. Everything is geocoded and we can link to things from addresses. One of the things we’re building is looking at customer service requests and health clinic patient outcomes.”
