How the City Makes Data Open

The City makes data open through data intermediary the Western Pennsylvania Regional Data Center (WPRDC), a partnership between the City, Allegheny County, and the University of Pittsburgh. The City has published 126 datasets.

The City regularly collaborates with the WPRDC and City Departments to identify datasets to be made open. We receive requests for open data via the WPRDC, and engage with community user groups to identify new opportunities for open data use. It decides what data to make open according to the principles outlined in its Data Service Standard.

City of Pittsburgh open data is published on the WPRDC web portal. The WPRDC hosts open data from a variety of sources throughout the region, and the city has a dedicated page on the WPRDC site. Any user can extract data from the site and receive help from the dedicated WPRDC staff. WPRDC publishes data using the CKAN data catalog standard and makes data available using the CKAN Datastore OData API to support interoperability between systems using open data.

To protect sensitive information, the Data Services Team partners with the department Data Coordinator seeking to publish open data to conduct a set of reviews to weigh harms against risk of publishing open data:

  1. The Data Services team and Data Coordinator in the publishing department evaluate sensitivity risk according to the “Data Classification, Personally Identifiable Information, and Sensitivity Rating Standard” (PII standard.docx). This Standard details how the City classifies data and forbids publication of sensitive data – instead requiring data be desensitized so that it can be made open. Before making data open, Data Services conducts pre-processing of data to ensure that data is sufficiently anonymized to be made public (eg, removing columns such as name or social security number, or obfuscating exact vertex coordinates to block-level, as appropriate).
  2. The Chief Data Officer and Data Coordinator from the department seeking to publish open data review the proposed dataset, data dictionary, and metadata with the Open Records Officer in the Department of Law.
  3. WPRDC conducts a data privacy review prior to publishing data on its website.