Plenar.io

We worked with researchers and policy students to build a new platform to explore and build with open data through space and time.

More about this project

Open data is often hard to discover and query. To address this, we worked with researchers and policy students at the University of Chicago to build a new platform to explore and build with open data through space and time.

DataMade partnered with the Urban Center for Computation and Data and the University of Chicago on a two year grant from the National Science Foundation to build an open source platform for exploring and working with open data.

At it’s core, Plenar.io is a platform that understands the ‘where and when’ of every dataset thats been loaded in to it. Structuring the data in this way allows us to query a place and time to find what data is available, and then explore, filter or download it. The goal is to reduce the work in finding, cleaning and extracting the plethora of siloed open datasets that are currently available.

To this end, Plenar.io features a well documented API for application developers and a robust data explorer for browsing.

Here’s a few examples of what we have loaded in so far:

And here are some examples of what you can do with the API:

The site, currently in Alpha, will continue to develop over time with new features and data.

Press

It’s What You Do With Data: Understanding Urban Ecosystems (video)
Brett Goldstein, Code for America Summit

Plenario, a Powerful City-Data Tool, Debuts
Whet Moser, Chicago Magazine

Former Chicago CIO Brett Goldstein talks about new civic data hub Plenario
Chris Hagan, WBEZ

Plenar.io, the next stage in open data
Jonathan Giuffrida, Smart Chicago Collaborative