City Budget Navigator
From Opendataday
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Owner and Team
Proposed by: Mark Kuznicki
Participants: James An, Jury Konga, Adam Thody
Best way and times to contact during RHoK 2.0 Dec 4/5 2010:: City of Toronto Open Data
Location Toronto/Canada
Summary
Create visualization tools to help citizens navigate the City of Toronto's $9.2 billion operating budget.
Background
In the past, city budget reporting has been relatively opaque, with the full City of Toronto operating budget documents consisting of a 600 page PDF document published to the City's site. Everyday citizens find this form and volume of information daunting. These documents are a barrier to increased understanding of how the City works, how it spends money and the many things that the City does for its citizens. The PDF reports do not allow for reuse or machine processing that would enable other expressions of the data in more engaging, visually rich and interactive displays on the web.
Use Case/User Story/Scenario
Use Case #1 - Interested Citizen
An interested citizen comes upon an interactive budget tool on a public web page, displaying a visual overview of the entire city budget by department. The individual clicks on areas of interest and the visualization changes, showing a deeper level of visualization of a particular department by category of spending.
Use Case #2 - Developer/Analyst
A developer wants to create a new kind of visualization that can engage a constituency of the public in a way that is meaningful to them. The developer discovers the City Budget Navigator public API, which allows for easy access to budget data in XML and JSON formats, and uses those tools and other open web tools to build new and contextualized visualizations off of the shared data in the API.
Description and Constraints
Extra Credit
Create a standard data structure that can support multiple cities. For research purposes, see the following:
Ontario Municipal Financial Info Return
Markham 2010 Budget
York Region 2010 Budget
Winniped 2010 Budget
Toronto Open Budget Initiative: [1]
Similar projects and Resources
Inspiration: Guardian UK spending review tool: [2]. Built using Flare.
City of London project for a city budget API created by Gavin Blair see this wiki page, this code on Github and this example website
City of Toronto 2010 budget reports in PDF formats: [3]
City of Toronto 2011 budget process: [4]
Vote for the official release of City of Toronto budget data at DataTO.org
Liberated City of Toronto 2010 budget data in a Google spreadsheet
Google Visualization API: [5]
IBM Many Eyes visualizations of "city budget": [6]
Google Refine: [7]
See the full list of tools on this wiki
Current State and Solutions
Our approach is to scrape/parse past PDF reports for budget data by department and expense/revenue category into a Google spreadsheet, use the London-based budget data API to store and serve that data for multiple visualization tools. Our first visualization will use the Google visualization API to demonstrate City budget data visualization in a treemap format.
At this stage, we have successfully liberated the 2010 Toronto budget data and published it via Google spreadsheet at this link. The London budget API code has been forked and adapted to Toronto's data schema. The URL citybudget.ca has been registered and mockups for a public facing site have begun.
What next and Sustainability
- the liberated data will need quality control checks to ensure accuracy
- the API code will need to be refactored given the scope of the project to support multiple cities
- a design for a public facing site at citybudget.ca will need to implemented which will include:
- some example visualizations using 2010 Toronto budget data
- developer access to the API as well as links to visualization tools elsewhere
- a call to action and guide to data liberation efforts that people in other cities can follow
