Our goal at the Western Pennsylvania Regional Data Center is to make community information easier to find and use. While operating the open data portal is at the core of our work, we also are involved in many different activities in our role as a data intermediary. To better understand how we’re doing, we have […]
News
Guide to Election Results Data in Allegheny County
Election day is today, and if you’re like us, you’re probably going to want to make a map of the results by election district. To do this, you’ll need the data and a map of election districts in Allegheny County. You can find a map of election districts as open data on our Website, but […]
Fall Into Data with Some Great Events
There are many great data-related events on our fall events calendar, including Data Day, our annual celebration of all things data on October 22. We hope to see you often this fall. Data Day Saturday, October 22, 10:30 AM – 3 PM Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh Main (Oakland), 4400 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15213 For […]
Reflections on the September, 2016 National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership Meeting in Cleveland
Here’s my recap of the fall partner meeting of the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership (NNIP) in Cleveland. As always, the staff at the Urban Institute and our NNIP partner in Cleveland did a first-rate job in organizing the meeting and providing us with an outstanding experience. Happy Birthday, NNIP Since 2008, We’ve been a member of NNIP. […]
Abstractions Reflections
Last week, we were fortunate to be invited to organize a “Distractions” workshop at the first-ever Abstractions Conference held at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center Downtown. Abstractions was a cross-disciplinary conference designed to bring together designers, software developers, engineers, and managers, all of whom have key roles in the software development process. Abstractions was organized by […]
Defining Environmental Justice Communities in Allegheny County: Data User Group Meeting Recap
On July 29, we partnered with the Allegheny County Health Department on an event held at their offices in Lawrenceville. We convened over 30 data users to identify indicators that can be used to identify “environmental justice” communities. The Department’s Plan for a Healthier Allegheny calls for targeted and focused strategies and investments to […]
Automated Open Data Publishing through ETL
As the Western Pennsylvania Regional Data Center grows in its number of publishers, and as those publishers release more datasets, having a system to efficiently and automatically load those datasets into the Regional Data Center’s open data portal has become essential. Automating the publication of data will provide our users with routine and predictable data […]
May 2016 Newsletter
Introducing the Property Information Extractor – It’s as easy as PIE to get property data! We heard you. It’s tough to work with the County Assessment Data and it’s 550,000+ records. Have you tried the Property Information Extractor? It allows you to pull assessment data by neighborhood, municipality, or even for a user-defined area. Since the assessment data contains […]
Building Products and Programs Based on User Feedback
At our first Property Data User Group meeting, we learned quite a bit about how we could improve the user experience for our current and prospective data users. We’re finding these User Group meetings invaluable for providing structure to our community engagement efforts, and user feedback to our product and program development efforts. Here are just three […]
Reflections on the April, 2016 National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership Meeting
Last week, I attended the Spring, 2016 partner meeting of the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership (NNIP) in San Antonio, Texas. NNIP is a community of practice for data intermediaries organized by the Urban Institute. NNIP has participation from over 30 cities and a growing number of organizations with a national scope. At the partner meetings, I always […]