Socrata | Social Data Platform
Collaborate: Sharing Data Between Organizations
Socrata Social Data Platform™ enables data publishing organizations to share their data with each other and with their respective audiences.
- Government organization using the Socrata Social Data Platform™ expose parts or all of their data to another Socrata-powered domain and maintain control over their data
- Constituents find relevant data based on topics or themes, regardless of where the data originates from
- Cities and counties and states create a seamless experience for citizens in the state
- State and federal agencies can enable real-time collaboration on a very large scale with little or no effort
Measure: Data Consumption and Engagement
How to measure success in Open Government initiatives? consumption of the organization’s data and citizen engagement are two key success metrics that Socrata measures.
- 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
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Measure: Data Consumption and Engagement
- Publishers track where their 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 site-wide, 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
Manage: Privately-Branded Datasites
Government organizations need to create constituent experiences that maintain a consistent look and feel and reinforce their organization’s visual identity. Socrata makes it easy to design branded experiences.
- Datasites match the look and feel of the organization’s parent web site
- Web designers can edit the look an feel using familiar web tools
- Branding extends to the Socrata Social Data Player™ which helps propagate the organization’s data to any website
Manage: Security and Licensing
Government organizations have the flexibility they need to securely publish and share data.
- Internal User Security: Flexible and distributed role-based model with Editor, Publisher, and Administrator privileges
- Dataset Security: Datasets can be marked as private, shared selectively or made public. Publishers can also digitally sign datasets to digitally mark the dataset as authentic and protect the integrity of the data
- Explicitly choosing between “no license,” public domain and one of the Creative Commons licenses gives publishers control over the terms of use
Manage: Social Experience Designer
One of the primary goals of Open Government is to promote civic engagement. Socrata provides publishers with configurable social interaction management to set the appropriate level of constituent participation on their datasites.
- 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
Publish: Data Publishing Made Easy
It used to be a technically difficult and cumbersome process to share data online. Some would say it’s even intimidating. Not anymore. With Socrata, line of business owners can manage their own data with ease and become first-class data publishers.
- Data Publishers create, manage and publish datasets without technical assistance
- Publishing and maintenance tasks are automated
- Publishers, either interactively or through the API, append, update or replace data while preserving all the dataset’s metadata
Publish: Flexible Metadata Management
What is metadata anyway? It’s what data publishers use to describe their datasets, create user-friendly column names and tag content to help constituents find the data and make sense of it. With Socrata, publishers are in control.
- Data Publishers define the metadata dictionary that best describes their datasets
- Administrators set and configure metadata at the data catalog level using categories, tags and topics for a consistent browsing experience
- Socrata datasets natively support rich data types such as location, URL, money or even documents or photos
Data Publishers
Government Organizations
- Publishdata management, metadata, automation
- Managebranded data site, social experience
- Measuredata usage, civic engagement, content distribution
- Collaborate
Data Consumers
Citizens, Journalists, Researchers, Developers
- Discoversearch, browse, guided exploration
- Analyzefilter, sort, download
- Participaterate, discuss, share, republish
- Createmaps, charts, mashups, apps
Discover: Searching and Browsing the Catalog
For government data to be useful, constituents must first find it. The Socrata Social Data Platform™ gives a non-technical user a multitude of ways to find relevant and useful data quickly.
- Constituents search the data catalog using keywords to find relevant datasets. A robust, weighted search index that combines metadata as well as row-, column- and cell-level data ensures maximum relevance of search results
- Constituents browse categories and topics in the data catalog and benefit from community tags and ratings to find the most useful and relevant data
- Searching within datasets is equally as easy
Discover: Making Sense of Data
Data used to be the domain of technically advanced users. With Socrata non technical audiences can intuitively interact with data online and easily comprehend it. Every interaction makes the data more useful to others.
- Constituents can navigate within a dataset using intuitive capabilities such as Sorting, Auto Filtering and Column Ordering to create personalized views of the data
- Socrata’s mapping and charting capabilities make it easy for constituents to access charts, maps and other filtered views created by the publisher or by other users, from the base dataset
Discover: Guided Search, the Ultimate in Accessibility
eCommerce sites have written the book on easy, intuitive, navigation of complex data. Can exploring government data be as easy as finding the right TV online? Yes. With Socrata’s Guided Browsing.
- Guided Browsing, (or Faceted Browsing) gives publishers the opportunity to create an intuitive experience for step-by-step, contextual data exploration
- Guided search removes the last psychological barrier that makes data intimidating to some constituents
- Guided Search is available for tabular views of data and for visual data representations such as maps and charts
Analyze: Advanced Features for Technically-savvy Users
Researchers, analysts and other technically-savvy constituents need more advanced data analysis tools in addition to bulk downloads in multiple formats.
- Technically savvy data consumers can perform advanced filtering and sorting operations
- Additional analytical capabilities such as roll-up and group-by operations are available natively
- Advanced users can download data in a multitude of formats of their choosing including CSV, JSON, PDF, RDF, RSS, XLS, XLSX, or XML
Participate: Data Becomes Social
Civic engagement, or citizen participation, is a stated goal for most Open Data initiatives in government. The Socrata Social Data Platform™ gives constituents a rich social experience around data that promotes participation and expands reach.
- Constituents contribute to creating a rich experience around data by providing ratings and comments. The social feedback loop in turn drives more adoption and consumption of government data
- Constituents help propagate interesting data on social networks creating a social distribution channel for government data
Participate: The Citizen Publisher
Interesting government data often tells stories that engaged constituents care about. Citizen journalists, bloggers and professional media are not content to just consume data. They want to use it to publish informed articles and opinion pieces. The Socrata Social Data Player™ makes embedding data on blogs and web sites a snap.
- Anyone can easily embed a dataset or user-created representation (view) of a dataset on any webpage
- Helps propagate data on blogs and media sites, beyond the government’s datasite, increasing its reach and exposure with constituents
- Provides a fully interactive experience that maintains the integrity and freshness of the source data
Create: Developers Love a Robust Open API
The Socrata platform provides an open, modern, RESTful API to any Socrata-powered datasite (catalog). The standards-based, non-proprietary API implementation ensures uniform programmatic access to data and metadata for any dataset or datasite on the Socrata platform.
- Dramatically reduces the implementation costs and lowers the bar for the developer community
- Increases the likelihood developers will invest in developing applications that use government data
- Support for advanced sorting and filtering operations reduce program complexity and overhead
- Open standards remove lock-in risk
Create: Developers Are Supported Every Step of the Way
An Open API is supported with a rich developer resource and community site for civic application developers. The Developer site features:
- Dynamic code samples that developers can run and preview, in context, throughout the reference documentation
- Code libraries that contain samples in Ruby, Java, Python, JavaScript, C# and PHP
- A vibrant and supported community forum and blog
- An application gallery promoting the latest apps created on the Socrata platform
Create: Anyone Can Create Maps and Charts
Maps and charts are useful and friendly ways to represent data. They help make data more comprehensible and accessible to constituents. Best of all, publishers can create them and so can constituents.
- Anyone can easily create a map based on geo data using either Google Maps, Bing Maps or ESRI
- Chart creation capabilities includes various chart types including: Area, Bar, Column, Donut, Line, Pie, Time Line, Tree Map and Heat Map
- User-created visualizations become part of the dataset metadata layer and help enrich the data to make the consumption experience more relevant and useful
