The City of Austin Data Portal is getting a new way to look at data. This is courtesy of our partners at Socrata, who provide the foundation for our data portal. The data portal currently has more than one billion points of data and Data Lens will be a new way to view that data.
Data Lens is not a change in the data portal, but rather a new open data experience that is designed to get open data to users in a unique way. This experience is visually, engaging, and intuitive. Data Lens allows the user to create a dynamic experience that allows the data to be interactive. For example:
"Data Lens page that summarizes a food inspection dataset might show the information as a bar graph, a line graph, and on a map. If the user clicks on a section of the map, the bar graph and line graph cards will become contextual, filtering the information based on the selected map area."
City Departments will beginning making their data sets available through the data lens shortly. In addition, departments will begin putting new data up on the data portal shortly. Stay tuned for more about the City’s new open data initiative.
Find out more about Socrata and Data Lens: http://www.socrata.com/blog/introducing-data-lens/