King County Open Data Newsletter

King County, Washington sent this bulletin at 02/11/2021 11:54 AM PST

King County Open Data

Open Data Insights | News for King County Employees who publish data on data.kingcounty.gov

February 2021 Issue

You received this email because you either have an account on the County's Socrata open data platform (data.kingcounty.gov), or you've expressed an interest in joining King County's open data community of practice. You can unsubscribe or update your email preferences here, or send an email to paul.alley@kingcounty.gov.

News

  • Discover all the data - KCIT's Data Team is working with agencies to ensure the County's public-facing data, maps, and dashboards are discoverable by searching the catalog at data.kingcounty.gov. Since January 1st, we've indexed around 70 new public data assets in the catalog, and also added links to external platforms like Esri, Amazon S3, Tableau, Sitecore, and Accela. Going forward, we're also working to index popular maps and spatial assets from the County's Esri geo-data platform so that data.kingcounty.gov can be a true single front door for data consumers.

  • Open data trivia on KC Twitter! - We're looking for trivia questions to post on the County's Twitter account that can be answered using data from data.kingcounty.gov. If your team has open data that would make for a great trivia question, let us know so we can add it to our open data trivia list. Feel free to be as creative as you want, as long as the answer can be found on (or linked from) data.kingcounty.gov. If you send a trivia item, please include the question, correct (and incorrect) answers, and the URL of the data where the answer can be found.

Open Dataset Spotlight

  • Did you know that the Marine Monitoring Program in King County's Water and Land Resources Division publishes a series of Marine Phytoplankton monitoring datasets on data.kingcounty.gov? This data contains phytoplankton samples collected from Puget Sound and analyzed using a particle imaging analyzer between 2015 and 2020. These datasets are up-to-date, verified for accuracy, and have all metadata complete (including column descriptions!). As open datasets go, these checks all the boxes and set an example of high-value open data. Keep up the great work, and thanks to WLRD's Water Quality Program for sharing this vital environmental data for the community!

Metrics for data.kingcounty.gov

Here are some of the latest metrics that show how data is used and organized on data.kingcounty.gov. If you'd like to see more data represented for your team or improve your metadata-completeness score, send us a note and we'll setup a check-in to discuss next steps.


metrics for data.kingcounty.gov

Top 10 most viewed datasets in January 2020:

  1. November 2020 General Final Precinct Results
  2. Adult Jail Booking January 1, 2020 to December 31, 2020
  3. November 2020 General Election Night Precinct Results
  4. Real Property Tax Receivables
  5. Food Establishment Inspection Data
  6. Adult Jail Booking December 1, 2019 to November 30, 2020
  7. Property Legal Descriptions
  8. King County GIS - Open Data site and FTP Download portal
  9. Lost, found, adoptable pets
  10. Water Quality

Top 10 unique search terms in January 2020:

  1. Tax
  2. Parcel
  3. Covid
  4. Jail Booking
  5. Population
  6. Divorce Records
  7. Health
  8. House Sales
  9. Building
  10. Stormwater/Water Quality

Socrata Platform updates

We're excited to announce some upgrades to the County's Socrata open data platform that will make it even easier to showcase and analyze public data:

  • Socrata's Measures feature allow you to create performance targets based on real-time data, and develop data visualizations to showcase progress towards goals.

  • Socrata's Perspectives feature lets authors easily create and publish web-based stories or reports using rich graphics, embedded visualizations, and custom text.

To learn how to use these features and more, be sure to check out the learning resources at learn.socrata.com (see information about getting an account below).

Learning Resources

  • Socrata Education Portal - Did you know that as a King County employee, you're able to access all of Socrata's education and training resources at no extra cost? Use this link to sign-up for your Socrata education account and get started! http://learn.socrata.com/?access_code=kingcountywa (note: learn.socrata.com requires a separate account than your account on data.kingcounty.gov so you'll be prompted to create a new username and password)

  • Live Training & Demos - If you or your team would like a live demonstration or training session to learn more about publishing and visualizing data on data.kingcounty.gov, let us know and we can either setup a session facilitated by KCIT staff, or work with the Socrata team to host a guided session.

  • Socrata How-To Videos - Socrata maintains a video library to help data publishers and data consumers make the most of the Socrata platform. These videos are open to the public and do not require an account to view.

Final Thoughts...

We on the KCIT Data Team want to make sure you and your department have the resources and tools you need to safely share, visualize, and promote the County's most valuable public data. If there's anything we can do to assist, let us know.

opendata@kingcounty.gov