datHere DMS Monthly Webinar Series Episode 1 – Wed, Oct 23 1-2p EDT
We’ve been working on data portals for a long time.
Since winning NYCBigApps in 2012, our journey has been quite interesting – we formed our first startup Ontodia and was appointed the first US CKAN professional services partner in 2012; deployed CKAN in several organizations and cities (UNDP, NYC Dept of Education, Newark, Jersey City, Pittsburgh, San Antonio, Boston, etc.); developed several extensions we contributed back to the project; did extensive research on open data; and developed several products to animate and humanize the raw data we were helping our customers publish:
- NYCpedia – a Semantic Encyclopedia of NYC – our first attempt to mash up open data from several sources to actionable information – joining them by familiar locations over time, computing indicators to enable neighborhood and borough-level benchmarking
- CivicDashboards – a nationwide, “productized” implementation of NYCpedia, using data from high value sources like the US Census, Bureau of Labor Statistics and FBI – enriched, contextualized and hyper-localized with data from our customer’s data portals.
When Ontodia was acquired by OpenGov in 2016, we helped build their CKAN SaaS. This allowed us to scale and implement more portals at all levels of state and local government across the US.
In this webinar, we share and catalog all the problems we encountered in our deployments, the lessons we learned, and what we’re doing now to address the Problem with Data Portals.
Some problems we address with current data portal platforms:
- Low quality, low-resolution Metadata & the lack of incentives for Data Stewards to keep metadata up to date
- How the data/metadata is not Findable, Accessible, Interoperable & Reusable (FAIR)
- Dated User Experience for both publishers & users
- primarily for Open Data and not for Data Governance and Data Management initiatives
(e.g. AI, secure data sharing, internal data exchange, etc.) - Raw Data, not Answers
- No way to track Downstream Usage of data beyond Google Analytics
- No Communities of Practice for data publishers, users, developers, service providers & analysts to learn, collaborate
and co-create with each other
