Data Driven Detroit’s New Open Data Distribution Site

Data Driven Detroit’s mission to provide accessible high-quality information and analysis to drive informed decision-making just got a little more high-tech. This week, ESRI rolled out a new platform that allows customers to more easily distribute geographic data to the public. D3 has been an avid user of ESRI products like ArcGIS and their ArcGIS Online platform since we were founded. As a pre-release partner of ESRI’s Open Data project, D3 is working to build the back-end infrastructure to house the data, as well as our own Data Driven Detroit Open Data website for anyone to use. With this week’s beta release, we are now happy to share the fruits of this labor with the public.

While it is still in its infancy, this platform is part of a group of online tools that Data Driven Detroit is developing to help make data widely accessible in a reliable, convenient, and timely manner.  With just a few clicks, users can search for and download available data in several different common formats for use in GIS and spreadsheet applications. Additionally, all of the data provided on the site are available through an API for integration with third party applications. This is just one more step for D3 in making data more accessible for community stakeholders, researchers, journalists, technologists, and government agencies.

Take our new tool for a spin and tell us what you think! Be sure to revisit the site periodically, we will be expanding the collection of data available throughout the beta period and beyond. We welcome your feedback, please send any comments or questions to AskD3@datadrivendetroit.org.