Open Data Series: South Africa
As a signatory to the Open Data Declaration, South Africa has built and maintained an open data portal containing numerous useful data sets, government action plans and applications that can help any open data enthusiast, data scientist or analyst dig into the rich and fascinating world of South Africa. The rainbow nation is certainly not without its share of controversy and while it is often in the media’s spotlight for crime and corruption, South Africa is a leader in producing data driven businesses and is a huge economy to watch out for on the African continent.
Lets dig into some of the Open Data projects simmering in South Africa.
City of Cape town Open Data Portal
This portal makes available all data that has been approved by the Open Data Policy. By increasing transparency into the city’s processes in each department, it aims to involve local residents and government in the promotion and growth of opportunity in the city. As a leading city with major water issues, there is a lot of work to do on the Water consumption data that has been made readily available. With the recent water issues, there is certainly work to be done around water consumption and finding other complementary datasets to figure out solutions for Cape Town’s water problems.
The call center statistics also provide interesting insights into the complaints made to government offices in cape town and could give data scientists insights into other issues that could be addressed. Identifying residents pain points can help guide you to building more useful solutions using other datasets on the platform.
Municipal Money Data
This project makes municipal finance data available to the public. The goal of the portal is to reformat the often un-digestable data that governments dump into the portal, into a format that the average citizen can understand and engage with. This data repository is very useful in understand the expenditures of each municipality and can help you understand city planning and decision making in the south African government at a local level. Once you have a good understanding of the datasets, you can download the relevant datasets and begin crunching numbers to answer more questions.
An important tool, this can be used to create graphs and summarize key information. The tools like the data bank, bench marking tool and reporting tool can help you break the large datasets down into granular formats.
SA Crime Map
The south African crime phenomenon is something the world has heard of, for better or worse. Any south African citizen has stories and concerns about crime and criminality impacting their family and their community. By mapping crime, this map enables you to have a safer journey though SA and understand some of the trends behind the crime wave. You can compare crime across different categories and investigate the crimes committed since 2003. This data is really important for the future of South Africa where crime is considered a top priority problem.
Finding data driven solutions for crime is hard but worthwhile. This data could be incredibly useful for security firms and I think an integrated API service that enables real time updates and easy, municipal level access would be the next level of this application and could help keep you safe. It would be interested to map crime density and how it has changed over time, especially around violent crime which is a huge concern for citizens. Sharing crime data and updating in real time is a good step towards a crime free life in South Africa.
Overall, this is a very skin deep investigation into open data in south Africa. I look forward to digging into more of the data and cooking up an interesting project on it. Get in touch if you have any ideas, comments or insights. Also, if you have any cool projects you want to showcase involving open data, get in touch!