Empower your organization to publish and manage public data

You can achieve your organization’s transparency goals, cost-effectively, by streamlining the data publishing process and automating maintenance and updates. Internal stakeholders, in any department or agency, with little or no technical assistance, become first-class data publishers. While administrators manage the organization’s Open Data assets in one central location and offer constituents a consistent and privately-branded online experience. Your organization has full visibility into how your data is being accessed, consumed and distributed through any channel.

Data publishing made easy

Compliance with transparency mandate begins with lowering the cost and effort involved in publishing data. What used to be a cumbersome, even intimidating process, is now accessible enough that your department and agency stakeholders can take ownership of.

Empower your line-of-business stakeholders to publish data

A straightforward interface for publishing data

Socrata will help you extract, transform and load the data from its system of record into the Socrata Open Data Platform.

• Anyone in your organization with knowledge of the data and with the right permissions can become a first-class data publisher
• Datasets can be uploaded interactively from a variety of common data sources
• Publishers have total control over the metadata used to describe their datasets and to make them easy to find, easy to comprehend and easy to use
• Publishers are empowered to create different representations of the base dataset using filters, charts, maps, calendars and other rich data formats, further helping constituents make sense of data

Automate publishing, maintenance and updates using the Socrata Open Data API

Once data is published, it needs to be maintained, updated and curated in order to keep it fresh and relevant. Socrata Publisher tools and the Socrata Open Data API (SODA) help you automate and streamline that process:

• Publishers can append, update or replace data while preserving all the dataset’s metadata through automated scripts
• Data can be updated in real-time or at regular preset intervals. City of Seattle for example, publishes real-time 911 fire data using the Socrata Open Data API

End result: Your organization can comply fully with its transparency mandate and enable a cost-effective Open Data strategy without burdening an already stretched IT organization.

A centrally-managed and configurable datasite, branded for your organization

Many government organizations have already been publishing data in various formats on their web properties. As the volume of data grows, it becomes nearly impossible for constituents to find data, but it also becomes increasingly difficult for the IT organization to inventory and manage these data assets in a consistent and cost-effective fashion.

A privately-branded datasite matching the look and feel of its parent .Gov site

The Socrata platform provides administrators and publishers with a central Open Data management platform, consistent admin tools and a powerful Open Data Catalog to consolidate the entire Open Data lifecycle:

• Administrators manage internal user security to create a flexible and distributed role-based model with Editor, Publisher and Administrator privileges
• Administrators and Publishers control how datasets are shared internally and externally with granular levels of security.
• Publishers can also digitally sign datasets to mark the dataset as authentic and protect the integrity of the data
• Publishers also control licensing at a dataset level, in order to manage the terms of use for their public data
• Datasites match the look and feel of the organization’s parent web site
• Branding extends to the Socrata Social Data Player™ which helps propagate the organization’s data to any website

Administrators can also configure and manage the social experience of your organization’s constituents:

• Administrators can enable a “Dataset Suggestion” system to allow citizens to suggest datasets and vote on datasets already suggested by others
• Administrators choose the appropriate level of community moderation for commenting and rating

End result: Your organization can enable its Open Data strategy cost-effectively and manage all its components on one platform: data publishing, security, licensing, branding and your constituents’ social experience.

Measure and track data consumption and citizen engagement

How to measure success in Open Government initiatives? Consumption of your organization’s data and citizen engagement are two key success metrics that Socrata helps you measure:

• Data Publishers track which data is popular with their constituents and how it is being consumed by access method (views, downloads, API calls, embeds)
• Real-time reporting allows data publishers to monitor poignant (“hot”) datasets and influential traffic sources
• Search trends show what keywords are most popular to provide insight into constituent demand for data. No more guessing which datasets the organization should publish

• Publishers track where the organization’s data is being republished on the web, using the Socrata Social Data Player™, providing valuable feedback on the most vital distribution channels for public data dissemination
• Data consumption metrics are available at the dataset level or sitewide, for any data range for maximum flexibility
• Publishers have full visibility into constituent participation. Indicators include the number and frequency of suggestions, ratings, comments and content sharing on social networks

Sitewide Analytics show key consumption and engagement metrics in near real-time

End result: Your Open Data project can not only be enabled, but it can also be managed and measured. This helps your organization show a return on its investment, drive more self-service and increase the utility of your data assets to your constituents.