While you all have been enjoying summer, we at Socrata haven’t been “on holiday.” Quite the opposite. In addition to having a few new permanent employees and two summer interns making solid contributions, the overall pace of the company has been brisk this summer. I haven’t kept the blog as up to date as I would like to, so I thought I’d provide a quick update today. Over the next couple of weeks I’ll provide an isolated update and review of each individual enhancement, but for now here are the quick highlights of recent improvements to the Socrata Social Data Platform.

A New User Interface in the Social Data Platform

After extensive usability tests, most importantly on discovery, comprehension, ease of use and performance, we started rolling out a new user interface a few weeks ago.  The www.socrata.com site and Socrata-powered, privately branded datasites are not monolithic, which provides an opportunity to deploy the new user interface incrementally as major components are ready.  The first component with the new UI is Dataset Details – the interface you use to sort, search, filter, visualize, share and generally explore data interactively.

A New UI for the Social Data Player

The Social Data Player, which lets you embed data in web pages, blogs and social networks, got a facelift too. The result is much improved discovery and comprehension of data and faster load times.

Faceted Browsing

One of the big new additions to the Socrata platform is “Guided Filters” which you might know by its more technical name, faceted browsing. Guided Filters lets non-technically trained users explore data by interactively filtering values and seeing the results change in real-time. It’s a great way to better understand the data.

Richer Charts and Graphs

We’ve introduced new kinds and types of charts and graphs dataset owners or dataset viewers can create. We’ve also enhanced their look and feel and made them more interactive too.

Open Data Federation Services

With Open Data Federation Services, multiple Socrata customers can link their Dataset Discovery catalogs to each other. For example, King County, Washington and Seattle, Washington could expose their data catalogs to each other. The result is that when a visitor is on either the County’s datasite or the City’s datasite and searches for a term, “crime” for example, the results will include datasets from both government organizations. It’s a great way to both expand the reach of your data as well as make it more convenient for constituents to find data regardless of where they are. Federations are bilateral (both sides opt in to the program) and can be either uni-directional (only one organization shares “to” the other) or bi-directional (both organizations expose their catalogs to each other).

Digitally Signed Datasets

Ensuring that government data is authentic and hasn’t been downloaded, modified and re-uploaded as official is a real concern. Socrata recently introduced the Digitally Signed Datasets Module, which allows data publishers to digitally sign datasets, ensuring that external attempts to alter those digitally signed datasets can be detected and invalidated.  This optional module is available as an add-on to either the Socrata Social Data Platform Premium Plan or the Social Data Platform Ultimate Plan.

Arbitrary Metadata and Metadata Attachments

Socrata has long offered very rich metadata for each dataset, including description, category, tags, column names, column types, source of data, reference URL to the dataset’s definitive location on the web, etc. Two new enhancements infinitely expand upon Socrata’s built-in metadata. First, publishers can now define their own metadata fields. Second, publishers can upload one or more documents as attachments. For example, if you have a PDF or Word document that describes the scientific method used when tabulating the data, you can now attach it to the dataset itself.

Sitewide Analytics

The Socrata Social Data Platform has long offered rich dataset level performance metrics, showing how and where data is being accessed and even re-embedded across the web. We’ve recently introduced the Sitewide Analytics Module which provides aggregate statistics – which datasets are most popular, most embedded, most commented upon, etc. The Sitewide Analytics module even shows search trends. You’ll know longer wonder what kind of data people are looking for, you’ll know implicitly by reviewing their search trends.

As I mentioned, I’ll blog more about each of these recent enhancements in greater detail in the upcoming weeks, but wanted to keep you apprised of how the Socrata Social Data Platform keeps getting better.

I hope your summer has been as productive as ours has been.