OpenDataKC: Government of Kansas City Open Datasets

Open data sets are helpful for citizens. Therefore, many government organizations use them.

Photo by Markus Spiske from Pexels

In this article, I introduce an exciting initiative called OpenDataKC developed by the Government of Kansas City. This project aims to help people find information about the city in detail at one location.

According to the website:

Open Data KC is managed by DataKC, which is part of the City Manager’s Office of the City of Kansas City, Missouri. We created this open data portal to increase transparency in city operations and to make it easier for our residents to access local government data. You can take a look at some of our most popular data, search datasets by name or category, or check out our data dashboards.

Kansas cit OpenDataKC

I explained free datasets and how to use them in an article titled Discovering Millions of Free Datasets on News Break. The purpose of the article was to introduce publicly available Google Datasets.

Like Google Dataset, OpenDataKC provides several valuable datasets, charts, maps, stories, and dashboards. Let me introduce the layout of the site.

Kansas City website

The site consists of three sections.

The first section is datasets, charts, maps, and stories.

The second section includes data dashboards.

The third section covers additional information and submission requests.

The first section includes 311 service requests, crime reports and stats, neighbourhoods code violations such as dangerous buildings, line-item expenditures and revenues, building development permits, transportation matters such as traffic, parking, and transit, health information including COVID-19, lead, food safety, and land use covering mapping boundaries.

In this section, 311 service Data and Visualizations includes all daily reported requests submitted to the 311section. For example, an issue about Citizen Reported Water Main Break is currently open, showing a map of the location of the problem. The issue is currently under investigation.

Kansas City Website

Citizens can also find crime reports and statistics in this section. There is a YouTube video on how to report crimes.

Crime reports from Kansas City open database

The data dashboards section includes resident survey, COVID-19, open budget, and the community health improvement plan.

The third section includes KCMO 311 service request submissions and sunshine requests covering public requests. Citizens can suggest a data set in this section. Furthermore, this section provides map-based information about the city. It is called parcel viewer.

Service request can be made via mobile apps at this link.

Kansas City Website

Overall, the use of the site is easy and quick. The datasets load very quickly.

However, I thought it could have been great to implement an AI chatbot to these datasets. I was curious, so I conducted quick web research on OpenDataKC.

Interestingly, I came across a YouTube video posted in 2018 mentioning Kansas City, MO CDO Eric Roche discussing the city's recently developed chatbot to help users navigate the open data portal.

Since I am interested in AI chatbots, I followed through the links and found the community portal on Facebook. However, when I tried it, there was no response from the messenger. I assume the pilot is not open to the public, or it was discontinued. The last message on the page was from 2017.

Accessing these datasets via an AI chatbot would be excellent.

Furthermore, it will be great to have more open datasets in the city.

The good news is there is an opportunity. The site informs citizens that:

"if there is a dataset you are aware of from KCMO or other jurisdictions that you think should be part of Open Data KC, please let us know. If you would like follow-up information about your suggestion, please provide a name and email address".

Kansas City Website

I hope the datasets grow and provide more insights to citizens. Many government organizations are embracing artificial intelligence. AI solutions are substantially dependent on Big Data with high volume, velocity, variety, and integrity of data.

The combination of AI and a variety of data sets opens cities in the U.S. to be totally transparent to their citizens.

Thank you for reading my perspectives.

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