A Central Hub for Open Data

The push for open data publication means very little if researchers can't actually use the data in accessible and meaningful ways. Useful insights often require putting local data into context with information from different places or different times. But in their raw form, datasets are often too specific to easily serve that purpose.

Plenario, a data platform currently in its alpha stage, intends to solve that problem for urban researchers. "With one query, users can access, combine, download and visualize disparate sets of data all in the same place [...] Plenario utilizes Amazon Web Services, a cloud-computing platform, as its scalable back-end infrastructure, which means that storage and computing power for more data sets is not a concern."

University of Chicago's Urban Center for Computation and Design (UrbanCCD) created and launched Plenario late last year. Users specify the neighborhoods or areas they wish to study by drawing a polygon on a map. The platform then delivers a summary of all the datasets available for that area, with links to the sets themselves. 

Plenario is open to outside input, allowing users to "upload any publicly available URL for a data source that is either a Socrata or CKAN data set or in CSV format, so long as the data includes the fundamental dimensions of time and location."