Civic Hacking

Improving Public Health with Open Data

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Municipal governments devote non-trivial resources conducting food safety inspections. These inspections require considerable bureaucratic infrastructure and highly trained staff, and play an essential part in protecting the public health.

And yet, despite this investment of time and resources many governments miss easy opportunities to extract additional value from this data that can further enhance efforts to protect public health and offer new insights into their communities. Here are some easy ways that local governments can get more value from food safety inspection results.

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Why Publish Open Data?

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Open data, especially open government data, is a tremendous resource that is as yet largely untapped. Many individuals and organisations collect a broad range of different types of data in order to perform their tasks. Government is particularly significant in this respect, both because of the quantity and centrality of the data it collects, but also because most of that government data is public data by law, and therefore could be made open and made available for others to use. Why is that of interest?

— Open Data Handbook

Here are three reasons why publishing open data is important for local governments.

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