Chapter 8. Case Study: City of Palo Alto Open Data

Why Open Data?

When people first start to work with Cascading, one frequent question is “Where can I get large data sets to use for examples?” For great sources of data sets, look toward Open Data. Many governments at the city, state, and federal levels have initiatives to make much of their data openly available. Open Data gives a community greater visibility into how its government functions. The general idea is that people within the community—entrepreneurs, students, social groups, etc.—will find novel ways to leverage that data. In turn, the results of those efforts benefit the public good.

Here are some good examples of Open Data and other publically available repositories:

City of Palo Alto

The sample app discussed in this chapter was originally developed for a graduate engineering seminar at Carnegie Mellon University. The intent was to create an example Cascading app based on the Open Data initiative by the City of Palo Alto. Many thanks for help with this project go to Dr. Stuart Evans, CMU Distinguished Service Professor; Jonathan Reichental, CIO for the City of Palo Alto; and Diego May, CEO of Junar, the company that provided the data infrastructure for this initiative and many others.

Thinking about Palo Alto and its ...

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