Order Summary

Socrata sought Xentity for Open Data professional services expertise to assist Douglas County, Colorado for expanding its value from its investment in the Socrata Open Data SaaS platform. Xentity and Socrata had collaborated on data.gov and data.colorado.gov previously. Xentity provided on-site open data consulting and platform management services. We provided our innovative data solution design services to this cloud, geo, metadata, and open data consulting project.

Problem and Solution

Douglas County sought to improve their open data programs with the ultimate goal of improving citizen quality of life, increasing economic opportunity and helping governments become more efficient and effective. Xentity staff developed applications and best practices including GIS for County Open Data Portal. This included identifying, collecting, formatting, cleansing and publishing datasets in Socrata. The team made recommendations based on open data and GIS datasets published and client epic needs. They also managed Socrata Open Data Portal and cloud-hosted databases accessible only via API and Site. Furthermore, this included extending a few early phases or new JS data visualization and analytical applications. 

 

Xentity staff designed and implemented overlay map service views in Socrata. We also trained in new open data extensions including GIS capabilities. Furthermore, in the second year, Xentity designed, built and QA/QCd a browser-based Amazon Alexa application to interact with an open data source feed. The application also interacted with an event calendar dataset, and recorded on S3 JSON interaction events and governmental units. Xentity’s responsibilities included: project Management, outreach and community support, roadmap and engineering facilitation and budget planning, visualization and data optimization design, feature backlog discovery for data challenges, data engineering, and socrata training. 

Outcome and Benefit

Xentity’s efforts helped departments identify, cleanse, format and publish high-value data sets. The team managed the launch and evolution of innovative data portals and data visualization applications and achieved program milestones (features, budget, quality). The solution addressed government agency coordination for data federation. In doing so, Douglas County was able to improve their open data program. This helped take a step forward in improving the quality of life of their citizens. Thus, increasing economic opportunities and helping their government become more efficient.