Dioxane. Epoxybutane. Trichloroethane. Dimethylhydrazine. Want to know the risk level of carcinogenic air pollutants in your county? Check out the Social Data Player below (See the “Total” column — all risk figures are per million residents):

Recently, the EPA made this dataset publicly available. This dataset is one of more than 240,000 government datasets which are expected to come online within the next month, many of which are hosted as downloadable CSV files. Providing downloadable files is a great first step for improving government transparency; however, the process of downloading the file and analyzing it with desktop software is cumbersome for non-technical audiences and makes it difficult to share with others online.

With the Social Data Player Platform we think agencies can usher in a new era of government transparency, by engaging the largest number of citizens possible. With the Social Data Player ALL citizens with a web browser can:

• Access the data directly in any website that contains the Social Data Player – there are no files to download or software to install. For dataset publishers, embedding the player is as simple as inserting a small snippet of HTML code into their site
• Easily search the data, and create filters, quickly finding the toxic cancer risk in the counties important to them



• Comment and rate the data, engaging in a discussion that might unlock new discoveries or questions about the data’s validity



• Share the dataset, as well as their personal filters, across popular social networks like Twitter or Facebook. Unlike an offline .CSV file, the data and discussion can be shared easily online, utilizing the connectedness of social networks to reach the largest number of citizens.

Not only do non-technical citizens benefit from accessing the data in a Social Data Player, but so do more technically-inclined audiences like software developers and scientists. With a Social Data Player, the data is instantly machine-readable via the Socrata API, as well as downloadable in popular JSON and XML formats.

Content managers benefit too. With Socrata Analytics – which is included in the Social Data Player Platform — content managers can track citizen participation. Socrata Analytics makes it easy to trend dataset access and track the proliferation of datasets on 3rd party websites.

Available Now

Today we’re excited to announce the commercial availability of the Socrata Social Data Player Platform for national, state, and local governments that want to transform the way their audiences consume and share public datasets. The SDPP includes the Social Data Player, capabilities for easy dataset uploading by content managers, the Socrata Application Programming Interface (API) for providing developer access to datasets in a machine-readable format, Socrata Analytics, and Socrata’s data storage and delivery network, which lowers the cost of delivering data online. To learn more visit our site or contact us.

If you are interested in getting started now with Social Data Player Basic, simply sign up for a free Socrata.com account and upload your datatset. Socrata Social Data Player Basic is our free entry-level offering allowing you to upload data to Socrata.com and then embed a Social Data Player on your site.