Context for Communities: Seattle and Metadata Standards for Civic Data
Following an executive order by Mayor Ed Murray, the City of Seattle has been working to make city data be open and accessible. Originally launched in 2010, Seattle’s open data portal is the go-to place where users can find datasets that cover all aspects of civic life. The City of Seattle publishes everything from the location of food banks to information about historical building permits.
We’re now nearly ten years into the open data movement, and cities are beginning to shift their focus from simply publishing data and are now working to derive increased value from it. Instead of looking purely at the number of datasets published, we’re thinking about awareness, discoverability, and use. At the City of Seattle, the 2017 Open Data Plan details efforts to increase awareness about the City’s Open Data Program, make it easier for City departments to publish datasets, and aid discoverability. Increased attention to data quality is a large part of this work.
As the open data landscape matures, the focus is changing to consider not only how data can be open, but how it can be used. Residents start with questions like, “How much is my house worth?” and then look for data to give them answers. But before we use this data, we need to know some basic information about it. Where did the data come from? How old is it? When people find a possible answer and ask themselves, “Is this information helpful for me?,” what they’re really asking about is context. It’s up to us — open data advocates — to provide this frame of reference.
I’m an intern this summer at the City of Seattle, and my focus is on civic metadata standards. High-quality datasets include metadata, which is information about what a dataset contains. If you’re looking for a book to read, have you ever looked to see when it was published, who wrote it, or how long it was? That information is metadata. Civic metadata helps us learn the same things about datasets. But unlike books, metadata for civic data is not standardized. Do we care who the author of the dataset is? Does the date matter? For open data, there is no easy answer.
My work this summer is to help the Open Data Program at the City of Seattle apply civic metadata standards to the datasets included on data.seattle.gov. There are numerous standards that are currently available, but the way they are applied varies. Data about some areas of civic life, such as bus transit times, corresponds well to existing metadata standards. But for others, such the data generated by cutting-edge Internet of Things devices, standards barely exist. How can the City of Seattle reconcile these differing metadata standards and apply them to the city’s datasets? It’s a challenging question, but it’s one I’m going to tackle this summer. Stay tuned to learn more!
