City Data Should Be Recorded in Unified Format

Cities are generating big data of themselves every second, such as the public transportation statistics and waste collection amounts. These information is being recorded by city government since long time ago for many reasons like levying tax. More and more city information has been being collected as big data and has been being analyzed by data analysts. A big problem I found last week is that the data is only simply entered and irregularly threw into the database. The data from different cities or from one city in different periods was always recorded in different formats. The different train tracks would limit the freights delivering and the different formats of city data would limit further data analysis.

The rapidly developing urban data science provides effective and powerful tools for city leaders and citizens to handle urban issues. To best use the big data of city and data analysis tools, data recorded in universal unified format or fast data converting system is necessary. As a data analyst, I call for such a policy or a criterion to eliminate the inconvenience caused by collecting and recording data in different format. And it also needs further discussions about how to solve the problem in a particular way. I think popularizing a criterion that first raised by one or several city leaders should be a feasible plan.