Municipal Insights That Involve More ‘Than Just Plotting Data Points on a Map’
Cincinnati City Hall Shutterstock
Cincinnati has rolled out 14 interactive dashboards that are regularly updated and built upon the city’s open data portal.
Cincinnati’s municipal government has launched 14 interactive online dashboards that feature regularly updated city data for topics ranging from heroin overdoses to trash collection.
The city announced the release of the new CincyInsights dashboard tools on Wednesday. Users can view the data in maps, charts and tables and can filter it in a variety of different ways. The dashboards rely on existing datasets pulled from Cincinnati’s open data website.
Data displayed in the dashboards is updated at different intervals depending on the topic.
Police response data, for example, is updated daily, while the information in the dashboard for trash hauling activity is refreshed every 10 minutes to show the progress of trucks along each route.
Some filter tools, those for police response activity for instance, let people select the neighborhood they’re interested in. Users can refine the data further by incident type and time of day. So, if a person wants, they could quickly create a map to display all of the police responses in the Queensgate neighborhood to auto accidents at noontime, since last December.
“What we’re doing here is much bigger than just plotting data points on a map,” said City Manager Harry Black in a statement. “We are opening the City’s data to the public in new and interesting ways.”
The heroin overdose dashboard includes information such as the neighborhood, date and time where each incident took place. Cincinnati experienced a spike in heroin overdoses during the summer of 2016. The dashboard shows 451 incidents in September alone.
A 15th dashboard for awarded contracts will go live next week, according to the city.
The dashboards are organized under categories that match five strategic city priorities—Safer Streets, Growing Economy, Thriving and Healthy Neighborhoods, Innovative Government and Fiscal Sustainability.
Bill Lucia is a Reporter with Government Executive’s Route Fifty and is based in Washington, D.C.
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