Understanding Open Data: The Citizen's Guide
About the Nova Scotia Open Data Portal
The
Nova Scotia Open Data Portal was launched in February of 2016 with an
aim to make government data more accessible to the public to support
government transparency and openness, spur social and economic benefits
of government data, and empower citizens and businesses to innovate and
create with government data.
Useful How To's
We've
pulled together some screenshots and videos on this page to help you
search for data and use some of the portal's built-in functionality.
Some of the information we'll cover includes:
- Navigating the homepage
- Searching the open data catalogue
- How to interact with the data
Navigating the Homepage
Below is an image of the Nova Scotia Open Data Portal's homepage. We're going to breakdown the homepage section by section.
Section 1: Menu Links
This section contains several useful links:
- Home brings you back to the homepage data.novascotia.ca
- Catalogue takes you to the data catalogue where you can browse through the data
- User's Guide links to Tyler Technologies' quick start videos designed to teach you the basics of interacting with datasets and visualizations on the portal through its tools and features
- Developers
opens a page created by Tyler Technologies with resources, support materials, and
tips and tricks for developers who want to programmatically access and
use open data
- ≡ Survey ≡
takes you to our Open Data Survey where we hope you will provide
responses that we can use to help us improve the Nova Scotia
Government's Open Data Portal
Section 2: Search Box
You
can use this box to enter search terms and quickly see a list of
matching data assets. For more targeted searches can can always begin
with Catalogue Links (Section 3).
Section 3: Catalogue Links
These
tiles take you directly to the catalogue or to specifically sorted or
filtered views. The top row includes a link to the full catalogue, and
three sorted views of the data by access frequency, by newly released,
and by recently updated. The second row of tiles are category groupings.
These filter the catalogue and return only the data related to a
specific category. The four categories are Social Services, Business and
Economy, Government Administration, and Nature and Environment. Each
category can be broken down further on the main catalogue page.
How to Search and Browse the Catalogue
This catalogue is
the gateway to all of the data and visualizations, such as charts and
maps, that can be found on the Nova Scotia Open Data Portal.
Section 1: Search Box
At the top of the main catalogue
is a search box. Any terms you enter here will be searched for matches
in the title, description, category, and tags. Tyler Technologies uses stemming
search functionality which means searches use the root stem of each
word. So if you search for the work "funding" your results will also
include data with the words "funds", "funded", and "fund". This broadens
your search results to help you find the data you are looking for.
Section 2: Search Results
The
results of your search are displayed here. You can click on each data
listing to view, and if desired, download the data. the default display
for the search results is by most relevant. the box in the upper
right-hand area of this section allows you to change the sorting of the
results to alphabetical, by most accessed, by recently added, or by
recently updated.
Section 3: Filter Options
There
are four different filter options you can select to refine your search
and create more targeted results. You can apply multiple options as
needed but only one for each type of filter.
1. Categories
Data
is grouped according to one of four categories described earlier:
Social Services, Business and Economy, Government Administration, and
Nature and Environment. These can be broke down even further in the
catalgoue by clicking the down arrow next to a category and selecting on
of the subcategories.
2. Types
The
open data portal contains a variety of data types such as datasets,
maps, charts, and filtered views. If you are looking for a particular
type of asset, like a map, you can apply a filter to search for only
those types of assets.
3. Departments
All
departments or agencies with data currently released on the portal can
be found here. Simply click the "Show All..." button to expand the view
and select the department from the list.
4. Tags
Tags,
or keywords, are applied to data when they are uploaded to the portal
and help to further categorize the listing for easier search and
retrieval. Although similar to categories they are more specific to the
actual data and its context.
Nova Scotia Open Data Portal Survey
Thank
you for visiting the Nova Scotia Open Data Portal. Please click on the
link above to provide us information on how you use open data, your
visit today, and your use of open data portals in general. This
information will help to inform us on ways we can improve the portal to
better meet visitor's needs. Your survey responses are anonymous.