animal outcomes at austin animal center

[haileypate]

The folks at Animal Services asked us to assist them with publishing the data needed for a heat map about stray animals. While we were looking into this issue, we took the opportunity to do an assessment of their items on the City's open data portal. The list of items that was analyzed can be viewed here. Some of our findings related to this include:

Out of 52 items on the data portal:

• 47 (90%) have not been updated since Jan 2015
• 40 (77%) received fewer than 100 visits since they were created.
• only 4 business processes are represented (animal intakes, outcomes, found strays, declared dangerous dogs)

We realized there may be an opportunity to make some of Animal Services' open data more user-friendly and also easier for them to maintain. After meeting with dept staff to learn more about their data portal needs, our team recommended modifications to both the intake and outcomes datasets.

The new outcomes dataset will be published automatically on a regular basis. Rather than publishing to a new dataset each month or year, new outcome rows will be appended to the same portal resources year after year. This way, all raw outcome data can be stored and maintained in one place.

[haileypate]

things left to do prior to public publishing:

• [x] confirm dataset name
• [x] confirm dataset desc (add beta label during 2 week beta phase!)
• [x] confirm dataset owner
• [x] confirm dept is animal services

when this stuff is ready, we'll be able to make public

[haileypate]

this dataset was published last Friday, 1/22/2016

[haileypate]

scheduled time to ask Duron a few questions about setting up new automation for this dataset, since we've changed the schema a bit to improve data quality (details about schema change are here). tentatively set for afternoon of monday, feb 1