Blog Posts

Earlier this month, we held data user group meetings, which brought together many different data users to discuss topics related to transportation, real estate, and housing. We’ve been holding data user group meetings since the launch of the Regional Data Center. These meetings allow data users and data providers to: * Build relationships with one another * Share what they’ve le...

On October 15, 2015, we went live with the data portal. This document gives us a chance to reflect back on a busy first year + 2 ½ months. In a followup blog post, we’ll take a look ahead at what to expect in 2017. Open Data Portal Use Use of the open data portal has doubled since the beginning of 2016, and we experienced our highest monthly use of the site in November, when over 2,000 users acc...

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 developed a series of performance measures, which we describe in this blog post. We have...

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 the results are not available as open data until they are officially certified by the Allegheny County Board of...

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 More Details, see the Event Flyer Data Day is an opportunity for collaborativ...

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. At that time, NNIP had been in existence for ...

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 organ...

  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 be made in areas of highest need. Establishing ...

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 updates, and provide efficiencies to ...

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 many different fields, users ...