This is a guest post from Steven Romalewski who blogs at Spaciality. Mr. Romalewski directs the CUNY Mapping Service at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY).  A theme throughout his work over the past 20 years has been public access to data - identifying, obtaining, analyzing, and providing widespread access to data sets that help people understand their local environments. He has previously blogged about New York City's OpenData initiative here.

@nycgov posted a tweet on Friday touting the map of WiFi hotspots on the new NYC OpenData site.  I was impressed the city was trying to get the word out about some of the interesting data sets they’ve made public. It was retweeted, blogged about, etc many many times over during the day.

The map is nice (with little wifi symbols  marking the location of each hotspot).  And it certainly seems to show that there are lots of hotspots throughout the city, especially in Manhattan.

But when I took a close look, I was less than impressed.  Here’s why:

• No metadata. The NYC Socrata site has zero information on who created the data, why it was created, when it was created, source(s) for the wifi hotspots, etc.  So if I wanted to use this data in an app, or for analysis, or just to repost on my own website, I’d have no way of confirming the validity of the data or whether it met my needs.  Not very good for a site that’s supposed to be promoting transparency in government.
• No contact info. The wifi data profile says that “Cam Caldwell” created the data on Oct. 7, 2011 and uploaded it Oct 10.  But who is Cam?  Does this person work for a city agency?  It says the data was provided by DoITT, but does Cam work at DoITT?
  • If I click the “Contact Data Owner” link I just get a generic message form.  I used the “Contact Data Owner” link for a different data set last week, and still haven’t heard back.  Not even confirmation that my message was received, let alone who received it.  Doesn’t really inspire confidence that I can reach out to someone who knows about the data in order to ask questions about the wifi locations.
• No links for more information. The “About” page provides a couple of links that seem like they might describe the data, but they don’t.
  • For example, this link tells me about the web map service that I can use to display the map on my own site, but doesn’t provide any meaningful information about the actual data themselves.

If I were to use the wifi data for a media story, or to analyze whether my Community Board has more or less hotspots than other Boards, or if I wanted to know if the number of hotspots in my area has changed over time, the NYC Socrata site isn’t helpful.

Even looking at the map on its own, it’s not very helpful.  Without knowing if the list of hotspots is comprehensive (does it include the latest hotspots in NYC parks? does it include the new hotspots at MTA subway stations? etc) or up to date (the Socrata site says the list of wifi sites is “updated as needed” – what does that mean?), I have zero confidence in using the data beyond just a pretty picture.

I’m sure if I clicked the “Contact Data Owner” link, eventually I’d get answers to these questions. But that’s not the point.  The point is that the new NYC OpenData site bills itself as a platform to facilitate how “public information can be used in meaningful ways.”  But if the wifi data is any guide, the OpenData site makes it almost impossible to meaningfully do anything with the data.

The wifi data is another example of how I think NYC’s implementation of the new Socrata platform is a step backwards.  Other NYC websites that provide access to public data — the City Planning Department’s Bytes of the Big Apple site as well as agency-specific sites from Finance, Buildings, HPD, and others — all provide detailed metadata, data “dictionaries”, and other descriptive information about available data files.  This contextual and descriptive information actually makes these data sets useful and meaningful, inviting the public to become informed consumers and repurposers of the city’s data.

The Socrata platform, in and of itself, seems great.  But NYC hasn’t done a very good job at all of putting it to use.  #opendata #fail