Post date: Sep 25, 2014 5:24:52 PM
Welcome to the blog! We are the VPC Open Data Team from Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Our team members are Ruofan Ding, Jon Gualdarrama, Ryan Horton, and Mike Perrone. We will be traveling to Venice to complete our Interactive Qualifying Project (IQP) from October to December 2014. Right now we are still in Worcester Massachusetts planning it all out.
The Venice Project Center (VPC) has been researching and gathering data for the benefit of the City of Venice for 25 years. We have lots of data about the City ranging from public art catalogs to boat traffic to canal depths. Every new year of Venice projects leaves more and more data in it's wake. There is enough at this point that we're encountering the great problem of not knowing what to do with it all. The data would ideally be completely public, accessible, and manipulable by anyone who wants it. This isn't quite the case yet. We surface a lot of the data though the VPC site, Venipedia, and the Venice Dashboard, but we want to explore more avenues to publish the data in a simple and raw state.
This is where the Open Data Team comes in. We're looking to work with the City of Venice to get our data sets published on their Open Data Portal: dati.venezia.it. In order for this to happen, we need to select the most compatible datasets we have and make sure they are up to date and in an acceptable format. After those details are worked out, we'll make the process of publishing VPC data to their portal as streamlined as possible, so this becomes easy for future groups to replicate.
We have the first draft of our proposal in the works right now, and you can check up on our progress with that here.