Open Data Challenge

[pm0kjp]

Open Data Challenge

While health data has strong privacy protections, other types of data are intentionally public. Many countries, states, territories, and municipalities have laws that require data to be publicly accessible. In this data challenge, you will find a public data set and explore it.

Finding Open Data

Find an open data repository for your country, state / territory, or city by searching for "[region name] open data." Explore what datasets are available. Examples of open data repositories include:

• Germany: https://www.destatis.de/EN/Service/OpenData/_node.html
• Manitoba: https://geoportal.gov.mb.ca/
• New York City: https://opendata.cityofnewyork.us/

There are also over 50,000 public datasets on the website kaggle.com.

Public data repositories might contain many different data sets relating to things like population, public transportation, taxes, civil service jobs, utilities, etc. Pick a data set that interests you to use for the rest of this challenge.

Share a link to a dataset you found by responding to this post!

Explore Your Dataset

Now that you have chosen a data set, it is time to do an Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) to figure out what it contains.

Explore the Metadata

Metadata is data about a dataset. First read this article about what metadata is and why it is important, and then see if you can figure out:

• The column or variable names
• The total number of records
• The type of data: is it numerical? Geographical? Human language? A mix of several types?
• If there is missing data, and if so, how much?
• Who maintains this dataset? How frequently is it updated?

Sharing some metadata, along with the link to the dataset, will help others know whether your dataset is interesting to them so they can investigate it further. If someone shares helpful metadata, let them know that it was helpful to you!

Explore the Data

Create a visualization of some of the data in your dataset from last week. If you are learning R or Python as part of your DART pathway try to create your visualization using one of those.

You will most likely get error messages as you attempt to create a visualization. When you get an error message, don't get discouraged! Here are a few tips:

• Read the message and see if it tells you what you need to fix,
• Try an internet search for the error message text
• Tell the community of practice about the error message in a comment here to see if anyone has encountered a similar error.

Did you succeed at making a visualization? Make sure to show it off here!

[maltenform]

https://www.mortality.org/Home/Index is a database I've worked with before (https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/full/10.1377/hlthaff.2017.0767)