Cincinnati makes maps to show people how government policies affect where they live

Contributed by Apolitical

This article was originally published on apolitical.co, a platform to help public servants tackle urgent challenges by connecting them to the most innovative policies and people worldwide.
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Cincinnati is showing citizens how public services and policy are affecting where they live through easily digestible, interactive maps and graphs that visualise city data. The CincyInsights portal lets users track public spending, business activity, ambulance calls, rubbish pickups and other services specific to their street and neighbourhood. The platform has significantly increased the use of and demand for public data, as well as improved public services: its heroin dashboard played a key role in helping medical officials combat the city’s opioid crisis.

Results & Impact

The CincyInsights data visualisations are making it easier for citizens to understand how policy affects public services where they live, and helping officials better use data to improve services. The platform’s Heroin tracker, for example, played a key role in helping medical staff respond to the city’s opioid problem by showing them where and when incidents were occuring, allowing them to preemptively deploy medical services to worst-affected areas. CincyInsights’ street-level data has also significantly increased interest in and use of the city’s open data, with citizens now downloading substantially more data since its launch, according to Leigh Tami, Chief Performance Officer and Director at Cincinnati’s Office of Performance and Data Analytics.

Key Parties

Cincinnati Office of Performance and Data Analytics, Tableau

How

CincyInsights uses visualisation software from Tableau to create data-driven graphs and interactive maps. Each dashboard (an interactive, at-a-glance visualisation of key data points) is connected to the city’s data warehouse. Created as part of the CincyInsights project, the warehouse pulls in data from city agencies and private vendors. This occurs at set time intervals, varying from every five minutes for the snow plough tracker to once a day for other data sets, and is often done via APIs. Before this takes place, city officials identify the type of data they want to display from each data set and clean it accordingly. Links between data sets are also planned in advance, allowing maps to integrate information from more than one source. The code is then written to extract the information in the desired format and store it in Cincinnati’s data warehouse. A second set of code pushes the data from the warehouse into maps and graphs on the CincyInsights platform. The data is automatically refreshed whenever new information is pulled into the data warehouse.

Hurdles

Creating the data infrastructure to feed the visual platform was complex and time-consuming, primarily because of the extensive cleaning and standardisation needed to make the data useable. For instance, data sets often contained personal information that needed to be anonymized, such as officer numbers in the case of police data. Different data sets sometimes also recorded the same parameters using different terms, each of which needed to be standardized. Additionally, all links between data sets had to be identified manually. For instance, to allow users to move between viewing information by addresses and neighbourhoods, code needed to be written to link those data sets. The visualisation process, therefore, requires considerable foresight to envision all the ways in which data needs to be combined, and ensure all discrepancies are ironed out.

Read the full article on apolitical.co

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