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. […]
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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 […]
So You Want to Use Open Data
This is the first of a series of posts for new users of the Western Pennsylvania Regional Data Center. We’ll also be covering basic free tools to help you get started for telling stories with data and also how to share that. Have something you’re interested in? Let us know, we want to hear from […]
Using ArcGIS Online and Open Data
ArcGIS is a geospatial tool that helps you create maps to visualize spatial data. Typically, subscriptions to the desktop version of ArcGIS are very expensive, and the software requires a significant amount of training to gain competency. However, by leveraging the power of preformatted open data sets and Esri’s streamlined and free edition of ArcGIS […]
Using Tableau Public to Analyze Open Data
Tableau is a powerful and easy to use data visualization tool that allows you to link properly formatted tabular data, such as data in .csv and .xls formats. The software also allows for the manipulation and aggregation across dimensions (e.g. record numbers, time and classification types) in order to analyze trends. Tableau can be a very effective […]