WSJ: Public Data…at Your Fingertips

Federal and state governments are a trove of information. Now a lot of it is just an app away.

Joel Schectman, The Wall Street Journal, March 8, 2013

Most government data have been available to the public for decades. But trying to find information quickly and in a useful format has been another story altogether.


All that is starting to change. A growing open-government movement has pushed successfully for state and federal data to be made more readily available online, in user-friendly formats. And the federal government has begun to release its data in a digital format that allows software engineers to more easily use it to develop interactive applications. App developers are now mixing and matching government data to help consumers, businesses and researchers harvest new insights.

Here's a closer look at some of these apps and websites.

Labor and Health Violations

DATA: Records of labor-law and health-and-safety violations for hotels, restaurants and shops
SOURCES:U.S. Labor Department; Occupational Safety and Health Administration
DESCRIPTION: The Eat Shop Sleep app by Rachel Moore maps health and labor-law violations by restaurants, hotels and shops, and combines that information with Yelp reviews. Now you can find out that the hamburger joint down the street owes employees $5,653 in back wages—but the sweet-potato fries are supposed to be divine.

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Salaries

DATA: Average salaries for hundreds of jobs listed by state
SOURCE: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
DESCRIPTION: Aequitas, an app from Fuzion Applications Inc., gathers salary data for more than 800 occupations from all around the U.S. Job seekers can see the range of salaries in any area and find out what they might command in, say, Nevada versus Illinois.

Business-Owner Addresses

DATA: Addresses of business-license holders
SOURCES: City authorities
DESCRIPTION: The Your Mapper app from Metro Mapper LLC shows information for business-license holders in Chicago; Portland, Ore.; and Louisville, Ky., on city maps. Salespeople can use it to target potential customers.

Hospital Records

DATA: Hospital safety records and quality indicators; patient surveys
SOURCE:U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services
DESCRIPTION: Hospital Quality, an app from MicroStrategy Inc., combines hospital safety and quality scores with patient-satisfaction scores gathered by CMS and uses the data to rank hospitals.

Flu Incidence

DATA: Weekly state influenza levels; crowdsourced reports
SOURCES:U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; Foursquare

DESCRIPTION: The Flusquare app from Floodlight Software LLC updates users on flu levels in their states and asks them to indicate when they may be sick.
If a user who also has downloaded the Foursquare app indicates enough symptoms to suggest he has the flu, the app then pulls his recent location data from Foursquare to find out where he visited when he was contagious. The app then warns other Flusquare users who were in his vicinity at that time to watch for symptoms.

Energy Prices

DATA: Consumption and price information for electricity and fossil fuels; power plants' fuel use
SOURCE:U.S. Energy Information Administration
DESCRIPTION: EIA's Electricity Data Browser (at eia.gov/electricity/data/browser ) collects nationwide data on power consumption and prices for the past decade, helping companies project future energy costs. Plant-level data reveals what fuel types are used, allowing companies interested in reducing their carbon footprints to estimate the environmental impact of operating in one location versus another.

What's Offshore

DATA: Locations of offshore oil and gas platforms; traffic patterns of marine vessels and locations of shipwrecks; offshore areas designated for wind energy and protected wildlife areas
SOURCES: Include U.S. Defense Department; Bureau of Ocean Energy Management; National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
Description: MarineCadastre.gov pulls data from 16 government and nonprofit sources into an interactive online map of U.S. oceans. It is primarily intended to help developers of wind and wave energy, but it also can be used by fishing and drilling companies.

Where the Sun Shines

DATA: Average annual global horizontal irradiance; photovoltaic plant locations; transmission line locations
SOURCES: Include National Renewable Energy Laboratory; Argonne National Laboratory; U.S. Interior Department
DESCRIPTION: Designed to help developers find sites for large solar power plants, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory's Solar Prospector (at maps.nrel.gov/prospector) pulls data on sunlight patterns, routes of transmission lines and locations of existing power plants into a single interactive map.

USDA

Food and Fitness

DATA: Americans' access and proximity to grocery stores; obesity rates; diabetes rates; physical fitness levels; proximity to fast food
SOURCE:U.S. Department of Agriculture
DESCRIPTION: The USDA's Food Environment Atlas (at ers.usda.gov) pulls food, health and socioeconomic data into various maps, allowing researchers to search for correlations between the availability of healthy food and obesity-related illnesses like diabetes. The maps also allow food-service companies to look for possible sites to expand.

National Nanotechnology Initiative

Nanotechnology

DATA: Nationwide locations of nanotechnology facilities, initiatives and degree programs
SOURCE:National Nanotechnology Initiative
DESCRIPTION: The Nanotechnology Resource Map (at nano.gov) shows the location of degree programs, facilities and research-and-development projects in the field of nanotechnology, giving businesses, investors and students interested in the technology a comprehensive overview of what's out there.
Mr. Schectman is a Wall Street Journal reporter in New York. He can be reached at joel.schectman@wsj.com.

Dashboards and Big Data: Before Fruit Ninja, Cybernetics

Will Wiles, The New York Times, November 29, 2012

THIS spring, Fraser Nelson, editor of The Spectator, chastised David Cameron, Britain’s prime minister, for spending too much time on his iPad. “One of his senior advisers says the P.M. spends ‘a crazy, scary amount of time playing Fruit Ninja,’ ” Mr. Nelson wrote in The Daily Telegraph. Such is Mr. Cameron’s devotion that he ordered the creation of an iPad app that would allow him to monitor the British economy.

According to the Web site of the Cabinet Office, the application is now complete. Called the No. 10 Dashboard, after the prime minister’s residence, it gives “the prime minister, other ministers, and senior Whitehall officials an at-a-glance overview of everything that’s happening in government and elsewhere” — stock prices, housing and jobs data, information on the performance of government departments, as well as the “political context”: polls, commentary and indications of the national mood from sources like Twitter. The prime minister liked having “quotable facts about what was going on,” said Alice Newton, one of the app’s developers.

The site included an example of the kind of data the app offers — a graph of Britain’s stuttering gross domestic product — something you’d expect Mr. Cameron to be able to see whenever he closes his eyes, let alone on his iPad.

The No. 10 Dashboard could be the White House Dashboard; Mr. Cameron plans to show the app to President Obama at the Group of 8 summit meeting.

The whole story is bathed in the white heat of 21st-century digital technology. “Ours is the first generation of digital natives coming through to work in government,” Ms. Newton said. But there’s nothing new about it. If Mr. Obama follows in Mr. Cameron’s footsteps, he should know that he’s also on the trail of another leader — the ill-fated socialist president of Chile, Salvador Allende.

What’s the connection between men so widely separated by ideology, geography and time? After assuming power in 1970, Allende’s administration was faced with economic paralysis, inequality and civil strife. The usual socialist prescription of nationalization of industry was applied, but Allende also looked to an unexpected quarter: the relatively new and niche science of cybernetics. Cybernetics is the study of control and communication in large, complex systems, be they organisms, machines or organizations. It spans management theory, information technology, psychology, biology and sociology. The Chilean government approached a British cybernetician named Stafford Beer and asked him to build a cybernetic hub for the management of the country’s economy — something that had never been attempted before, or since.

A recent history, “Cybernetic Revolutionaries,” by Eden Medina, gives the subsequent project, Cybersyn, the serious attention it deserves. The system, once up and running, would have channeled data from Chile’s nationalized industries into an operations room in Santiago, where Allende’s ministers would have made informed decisions in chairs with control panels built into the armrests. Photos of this room still retain a veneer of giddy futurity. White surfaces, pared-down interfaces, rounded corners — a dash of Apple in the mix.

Ms. Medina contends that rather than a tool of technocratic centralization, Cybersyn was democratic in design and intent. Workers would have access to the heart of government and could inform decision makers. The aim was transparency and economic and social homeostasis, a natural equilibrium. Mr. Beer called the system the “Liberty Machine.” But Allende’s regime, overthrown by a C.I.A.-backed military coup in 1973, didn’t last long enough to see Cybersyn operate.

The No. 10 Dashboard taps into the same desire to master available information — a desire that has only grown as the amount of information in circulation has increased. Where Cybersyn needed dedicated national infrastructure and rooms full of equipment, the app runs on a hand-held device. And yet, the dashboard is actually less sophisticated.

It is not truly cybernetic because it lacks a mechanism to translate all that data into action. It can display information; it cannot consult and control. Less a driver’s dashboard, it is more a window out of which a passenger can observe the national scenery speeding past. Government might be given the illusion of hand-held, one-stop manageability, but no actual managing is going on.

The app could thus be an apt metaphor for politicians reduced to spectators by the surges and shocks of the globalized world. Mr. Cameron should remember that there’s at least one other instance of government-by-app: the team that worked on restructuring Greece’s debt used iPads too, equipped with an app purpose-built for the job.

However that turns out, we can at least say this: in terms of distractions, these apps are marginally more useful than Fruit Ninja.

Will Wiles is the author of the novel “Care of Wooden Floors.”