Celebrate Open Data Day 2023 and Learn More About Your Community by Exploring City of Arlington’s Datasets, Interactive Maps

By Susan Schrock, Office of Communication

Posted on February 28, 2023, February 28, 2023

In honor of Global Open Data Day this Sunday, the City of Arlington is celebrating new additions to its Open Arlington data portal, which offers nearly 50 downloadable datasets and numerous interactive web maps published that are free for anyone to use.

Open Data Day is March 5 this year, and is an annual celebration that highlights the benefits of open data and encourage people to connect and build solutions to social issues in their community by using open data. The City of Arlington became the first city in Texas to achieve What Works Cities silver certification in 2019 and gold certification in 2020, and is proud of its work to make data more consumable, reliable, and readily available for residents, departmental staff, and leadership.

Since 2017, the Open Data Portal has served as the City’s central clearinghouse for accessing, visualizing and interacting with the City’s open data sets. Here, you can explore data related to a variety of topics, including transportation, environmental issues, neighborhood amenities and public art, and some of the socioeconomic characteristics of our community. By making data more consumable, the City aims to better connect with its residents, create efficiencies for departments and spur collaboration with the private sector, such as partnering with a web app developer who could create an interesting or useful interactive tool for customers or the community.

Some of the City’s data quality improvements and innovations in 2022 include:

• Publication of a Data Service Standard to ensure all City data is transparent, accessible to all, user friendly, and can be used to solve real-world problems in our community. The Data Service Standard builds upon the Open Data Policy and is published on the City’s Open Data Portal.
•  Improvements to the public facing portal include a new design and layout, updated user-friendly categories, step-by-step guides on accessing and interacting with open datasets, a new page with full set of available datasets and a survey for users to input their own ideas to include.
•  The Open Arlington Data Portal includes 46 downloadable datasets and 13 interactive web maps and applications.
•  Census data including the demographic and housing estimates tables, the economic characteristics table, and the social characteristics table were updated with newly available 2016-2020 ACS 5-year Estimate data.
•  Additionally, three web maps were added to Open Arlington about the Bankhead Highway, Arlington’s fallen WWII veterans and The Hill, the City’s historic African American community.

 Whether you are interested in learning more about public art, hike and bike trails, public infrastructure improvements or economic development happening near you, we encourage you to explore the site to learn more about The American Dream City. As always, residents are encouraged to visit Arlington Maps Online and the Issued Permits Web Map to explore information related to individual properties as well as recent building activity.

 Do you have an idea on how to improve our site? Please visit the Get Involved page to suggest new datasets, maps or other ideas related to data that you would like to see.

 Click here to learn more about the City of Arlington’s Open Data Policy.