First Records Released On San Diego's Open Data Site

I am Allison Chinchar on them for Maureen Cavanaugh anywhere listening to KPBS Midday Edition San Diego has been playing catch-up in the open data movement. That is or cities like Chicago and Boston and San Diego sure things like crime reports and taxi data for everyone to see. Citizens can download the data and do something interested with a. It into the most popular parking meters downtown or zoning apps. The portal launched this month allowing access to dozens of data sets. Joining me with more on this program is the chief data officer Maksim Pecherskiy. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for having me. This just opened this month give us a sense of what kind of information you now have available that was not before. We are releasing a lot of interesting information raw data specifically so one of the data sets I am personally excited about is we have every single transaction since January 1, 2015 as well as all of their locations and they are releasing the water sampling data and the street sweeping schedules as well as all the permits that were issued and all of that kind of stuff. Was or anything that really took me by surprise? I thought about this a little bit and the parking meters I think it is really cold. It's a very large set of data so I am personally very excited to play around with it and look at predicting where is the space more likely to be open during certain periods of time. Parking meters is a great example we take a very large data set that may be hard for regular people to work with that may not be programmers or data scientist and we are providing aggregations we are willing 11 told is permitted per month and totals per day. We are providing visualization where people can go and look at a map and see all the meters for 2015, how much each meter maid, and how many transactions happen. Is it something you can use to find a parking spot for the next hour or more in general which parking meters are used the most? That is more in general. I know of one person that lives downtown who has looked at the map to try to figure out what is the least used parking meter so that she can park. This has been in effect in some other cities for quite a while. What are some of the apps we have seen in other cities that do not exist right now in San Diego but you think would work your -- here? There's a lot of cases where you see companies like so low or yelp picking up city data and bringing it in. We are actually already seen a little bit of activity here for example I am excited about an app that might be coming out soon that will feature the cities events in the city state of that they will be bringing in. And for parking meters to figure out where you can park. When you say events evening so that people can really be on top of everything that is going on in the city? For example it's a Saturday morning trying to figure out I kind of need some apples with the farmers market I can go to or maybe if I have a commute are want to know if there's anything going on is going to block my way. There are 44 data sets on the site so far and it is quite cumbersome. Not everyone can go into this and putting on a spreadsheet. Who are you expecting to sift through the information at the moment. As you can see there's the hackers are software developers are data scientists and the other -- these people will be able to find large first-class data sets on the portal and we also have city employees as an audience and regular residence. Hackers are the first one are they the ones you suspect will use the site the most Only the first one of you look from left to right. I am actually very excited to see what uses will come from non-software developers. I'm excited for those. There's a lot of people that have questions that are as simple as I know we keep on back to the parking meters but how much the parking meters on my block make. You should not need to know how to work with large data sets to be able to answer the questions. You are helping other people will come and look at this data It's an invitation to people seen a lot of data here and what motivates you and makes you think that this is really worthwhile as a project. Give us an example of something else that might be an app that would make difference to San Diego residents. An app that would make a difference to San Diego residents -- have you -- the fire department is doing this. We are releasing the data that -- of fire incidents they provide the data to an application called pulse point so if you're CPR certified person you can get notified when there is an it -- an incident area where you can go and assist. I think that's really powerful. There are 44 data sets on the site in the city said there are 1000 that you may release. It you have not at the moment released a list of what is on the thousand. So I news source has been trying for months to find out what the city plans to make public. As you know there is data as the inventory that has been published adding data sets to the list. One of our main concerns is not to expose the city so any cyber security threat and we are taking very strong precautions with that and we also have very strict release policies to make sure that we don't really see anything at all that is personally identifiable. This is a major area that we have to think about. To have a timeline? Thank you so much to Maksim Pecherskiy San Diego's chief data officer.