When Open Data is Not Enough - GovLoop

"Open data portals around the world have certainly provided lots of data to anybody with the skill to download a dataset.  If you don’t have a particular analysis in mind, but want to develop an app to make the available data more useful, you are in luck.  If one of the available datasets hits the nail on the head for a problem you want to work on, even better.  However, the data that sits in open portals is there for a number of reasons. Opendatahandbook.org provides many good reasons as to why.  Many data sets are the result of Freedom of Information Acts (FOIA) actions that some government leaders see as an opportunity to put up additional data. However, if it’s not in the open data portals, the data one might need to address a particular problem may not be readily available. To address some of the most important problems that states and cities have, open data may not have the richness needed to identify the most important factors.  The crime data is a good example of this.  While the crime incident data that many jurisdictions are putting on their data portals tells us when, what and where a particular crime was reported, it does not tell us anything about the who–perpetrator or the victim.  In many cases, we don’t know who the perpetrator is until they are arrested, so that data may be missing anyway. However, we should have good data on the victim.  To learn about who is victimized in particular places in what ways is critical to addressing the crime problem.  Having historical information on crime incidents at a particular place and knowing whether similar types of individuals are being victimized (elderly, youth) could be valuable for better addressing crime ..."