Researchers Say Much to Be Learned from Chicago’s Open Data by Sam Cholke.
From the post:
HYDE PARK — Chicago is a vain metropolis, publishing every minute detail about the movement of its buses and every little skirmish in its neighborhoods. A team of researchers at the University of Chicago is taking that flood of data and using it to understand and improve the city.
“Right now we have more data than we’re able to make use of — that’s one of our motivations,” said Charlie Catlett, director of the new Urban Center for Computation and Data at the University of Chicago.
Over the past two years the city has unleashed a torrent of data about bus schedules, neighborhood crimes, 311 calls and other information. Residents have put it to use, but Catlett wants his team of computational experts to get a crack at it.
“Most of what is happening with public data now is interesting, but it’s people building apps to visualize the data,” said Catlett, a computer scientist at the university and Argonne National Laboratory.
Catlett and a collection of doctors, urban planners and social scientists want to analyze that data so to solve urban planning puzzles in some of Chicago’s most distressed neighborhoods and eliminate the old method of trial and error.
“Right now we look around and look for examples where something has worked or appeared to work,” said Keith Besserud, an architect at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill's Blackbox Studio and part of the new center. “We live in a city, so we think we understand it, but it’s really not seeing the forest for the trees, we really don’t understand it.”
Besserud said urban planners have theories but lack evidence to know for sure when greater density could improve a neighborhood, how increased access to public transportation could reduce unemployment and other fundamental questions.
“We’re going to try to break down some of the really tough problems we’ve never been able to solve,” Besserud said. “The issue in general is the field of urban design has been inadequately served by computational tools.”
…
In the past, policy makers would make educated guesses. Catlett hopes the work of the center will better predict such needs using computer models, and the data is only now available to answer some fundamental questions about cities.
…(emphasis added)
Some city services may be improved by increased data, such as staging ambulances near high density shooting locations based upon past experience.
That isn’t the same as “planning” to reduce the incidence of unemployment or crime by urban planning.
If you doubt that statement, consider the vast sums of economic data available for the past century.
Despite that array of data, there are no universally acclaimed “truths” or “policies” for economic planning.
The temptation to say “more data,” “better data,” “better integration of data,” etc. will solve problem X is ever present.
Avoid disappointing your topic map customers.
Make sure a problem is one data can help solve before treating it like one.
I first saw this in a tweet by Tim O’Reilly.