Blog Posts

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 things we've been working on since the m...

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 you! Introduction: What is Open Data? So we have this snazzy new tool that you may have heard buzz abo...

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 Online, you can begin creating maps in no time....

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 learn from friends in other cities ...

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 reporting or presentation tool, and with just a c...

The first User Group meeting for property data was held at the East Liberty Carnegie Library the afternoon of March 3, 2016. The Western Pennsylvania Regional Data Center launched Data User Groups to help people to build relationships with other data users, learn from one another about data, contribute to efforts to improve data quality and documentation, share data publication priorities, provide...

Introduction The purpose of the meeting held on February 24th at the Oakland Forbes Avenue Panera was to brainstorm, discuss, and refine ideas for an event and other activities to allow the broader community to develop insights about environmental issues that impact community health. 12 people attended the meeting, and the conversation helped to frame an event that the Regional Data Center will ...

In case you missed it, we’re writing a monthly newsletter. Here’s the February edition. We use our newsletters to share special subscriber-only content, and we encourage you to sign up to receive them in the future…    ...

In January 2016, Allegheny County released five years of utility cost and usage data to the Western Pennsylvania Regional Data Center's open data portal. This dataset mirrors the format of the City of Pittsburgh’s previous released energy data, and also includes water and sewer information. For a large organization, compiling accurate and complete energy data is not as simple as it sounds. Allegh...

On December 4th, the Western Pennsylvania Regional Data Center hosted the first in a series of data user group conversations on the topic of environmental justice in partnership with the Allegheny County Health Department. The meeting was held at the University of Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Public Health. Nearly thirty people joined us for the conversation. Participants came from government, ...