Launching Chicago’s first TIF Portal
Mayor Rahm Emanuel has launched the City’s first TIF portal, an easy-to-navigate map of TIF districts and project data. The Portal is part of the mayor’s continuing efforts to make Chicago one of the...
View ArticleBuilding a Smarter Chicago
There has been a lot of talk in recent years about “smarter” cities, cities that apply technological solutions to become more effective and more efficient. This Technology Plan lays out a vision for a...
View ArticleOpen Data in Chicago: A Comprehensive History
In only a few years’ time, municipal initiatives to open up public data have gone from drawing-board ideas to tech policy fixtures. According to data.gov, 39 U.S. cities now have their own data...
View ArticleChicago’s SmartData Platform: Pioneering Open Source Municipal Analytics
Funded with a $1 million grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies, Chicago’s SmartData project will build the first open-source, predictive analytics platform – aggregating and analyzing information to help...
View ArticleInnovative App Celebrates One Year of Protecting Public Health
One year after its launch, food safety application Foodborne Chicago is leveraging technology to help hundreds of Chicagoans report food poisoning incidents to the Chicago Department of Public Health...
View ArticleAll systems go: Chicago data portal status blog
So, you’ve come to rely on the open data portal to power a website, a research project, or simply browse. First, thank you! We do want to make the open data portal an effective platform for everyone....
View ArticleSummertime Data: Four new datasets launched on open data portal
The City of Chicago has released a handful of new datasets which pertain to several parts of daily life in Chicago. The public will be able to explore the water quality at Chicago beaches, find who and...
View ArticleIntroducing Data Lens for the Open Data Portal
Our Open Data Portal now includes a new view type − Data Lens. These views do not present any new data. Rather, much like charts, they offer a way to summarize and explore existing datasets. Data Lens...
View ArticleNow Available: RSocrata 1.6.0
Last year the City’s data science team released the first version of RSocrata, which allows an easy way for R programmers to access and download data from Socrata data portals using the R statistical...
View ArticleReturn of Summer: Beach Water Quality and new Beach Weather Stations
With the opening of swimming season, the Chicago Park District water sensors at Lake Michigan beaches are live again and streaming to the data portal hourly. That dataset has a partner dataset,...
View ArticleOpen Data ETL Utility Kit version 1.2.0 now available
One of the important lessons we’ve learned with open data is to leverage technology to automatically update data. There are a number of benefits to this: leveraging technology means we can update data...
View ArticleEnergize yourself with analyzing energy data from Chicago Energy Benchmarking...
Just one percent of Chicago’s buildings comprise 20 percent of the total energy consumed. For the first time, the City of Chicago is releasing detailed information on the energy consumption and...
View ArticleImproved Lobbyist Data
We have revamped the presentation of data about lobbyists on our Open Data Portal. People lobbying the City of Chicago are required to register with the Board of Ethics and file periodic reports...
View ArticleOpenGrid: Explore your community
Four years ago, Chicago led in the innovation of open data portals. The city was first to appoint a Chief Data Officer and, subsequently, the number of datasets grew to include detailed information on...
View ArticleGet ready for the 2016 Energy Benchmarking Survey
Three years ago Chicago Energy Benchmarking Ordinance was adopted to raise awareness of energy performance through information and transparency, with the goal of unlocking energy and cost savings...
View ArticleLove is in the air and West Nile testing results are on the open data portal
Things are heating up around Chicago. Love is in the air and so too are the little bugs we all love to swat – mosquitoes. The “little fly” is a fact of life in the Windy City, and the Chicago...
View ArticleOpenGrid v1.0.2
Three months ago, Chicago released OpenGrid, a project which lets you explore data in your neighborhood. This week, we released v1.0.2, which has fixed a number of bugs discovered since the launch,...
View ArticleAn Open Data Gift for Chicago Bike Week
Happy Chicago Bike Week! Chicago has over 200 miles of on-street protect, buffered, and shared bike lanes and over 13,000 bike racks. Chicago also has DIVVY, a bike-sharing program with 480 docking...
View ArticleIs it safe to swim? A new tool to make better predictions for Chicagoans
We are very excited that, this summer, the City of Chicago teamed-up with a team of volunteer data scientists to develop new statistical models to improve the accuracy of beach advisories due to the...
View ArticleCalling Developers: Help us build OpenGrid
Six months ago, the City of Chicago launched OpenGrid, an open-source platform to view data about your city, your neighborhood, or even your block. OpenGrid evolved from the city’s internal,...
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