Library to tackle Boston's data

Written By Unknown on Minggu, 12 April 2015 | 12.32

A new team of librarians will take the mountains of data that the city of Boston releases to the public and make it usable and understandable for everyone, thanks to a nearly half-a-million-dollar grant.

"(The grant) is focused on taking the incredible open data resources that the city makes available and make them more useful to people," said Jascha Franklin-Hodge, the city's chief information officer. "You'll have easier access to that data by working through our public libraries to get it."

The city and the Boston Public Library is hiring a team of librarians who will be charged with making data as easy to find and understand as books.

The project is being funded through a $475,000 grant from the Knight Foundation.

"Librarians are a workforce that specialize in information curation and pointing citizens toward the information when they need it," said John Bracken, vice president of media innovation for the Knight Foundation. "We were particularly taken with the possibility of leveraging the platform of the library, the physical space of the library, to accelerate the use of civic data coming out of open government."

The program will likely include training and reference materials for residents.

"This will have relevance for the individual on the street, any resident," said David Leonard, director of administration and technology for the BPL. "In some ways it's a natural evolution of our traditional reference services."

The data that is routinely released by the city includes Citizen's Connect requests, crime incident reports and food permit maps, information someone interested in moving to a new neighborhood may want to know.

Boston has published much of the city's data for more than a year, starting with an Open Data executive order from Mayor Martin J. Walsh.

But, data.cityofboston.com is overwhelming, and hard to use for people who do not have a data science background.

"Historically, open data has just been a website that we throw up, and we put the data up there and say OK, our job is done, the data is open," Franklin-Hodge said. "That's the equivalent of getting a room and just throwing a pile of books on the floor and saying here's your library."

Last month, Boston released much of its data to techies, challenging them to create apps and visualizations that explain what is happening in the city.


Anda sedang membaca artikel tentang

Library to tackle Boston's data

Dengan url

http://bintanggugel.blogspot.com/2015/04/library-to-tackle-boston-data.html

Anda boleh menyebar luaskannya atau mengcopy paste-nya

Library to tackle Boston's data

namun jangan lupa untuk meletakkan link

Library to tackle Boston's data

sebagai sumbernya

0 komentar:

Posting Komentar

techieblogger.com Techie Blogger Techie Blogger