Open government data portals are essential to transparency and civic education for citizens, and supports the work for data researchers and academics especially in smaller cities such as Hartford, CT. These portals provide data from a number of different government agencies spanning education, financial, housing and public safety sectors. For an Data Scientist living in Connecticut I frequently explore the Hartford Data Portal as well as the Connecticut Data Portal to support my interests in civic data and technology and for the ease of access to analysis-ready data sets. My previous projects with open government portal data include: ttbbeer: R data package of beer statistics from the US Treasury, historical Connecticut real estate sales, and Hartford snowstorm towing.

Exploring the data from Socrata tables are a great step forward for open data initiatives and the next step forward is creating succinct web applications which empower non-technical users to gain insights about the data sets.

I have developed a shiny flexdashboard to explore a data set on reported crime incidents to the Hartford Police, which weaves together a story though visualizations and interactive shiny components to add value and context to the original data set. See below for the live application link.

shinyapps.io link to application

Let me know what you think!