The Province of Prince Edward Island announced its new Open Data Portal today in the Legislative Assembly.
I played no role in this other than as mystical spirit guide, but I’m proud to see the breadth and depth of data available there, and the flexibility the Socrata tool its based on affords for visualization.
My favourite data set so far is the Motor Vehicle Registrations from 1918, and the visualization it includes that charts registrations of cars, trucks, trailers and motorcycles vs. the Island’s population (population is the top line):
I spent enough years working with government on wrangling data and information to know that the bureaucratic processes required to release something like this are myriad and complex, and the public servants responsible for this deserve a pat on the back.
Comments
That's undoubtedly a good result from steadily nudging and encouraging people. Btw, Socrata is a great product (we've worked with them in NL). They also have the option of building dashboards, which I like a lot. Those dashboards provide the current status of a range of local policy goals, and clicking on them take you to the underlying data, where you can download or play with different types of visualisation. By having those type of public accountability dashboards based on their own open data, it also helps sustain the open data effort (it's not just for 'someone else').