A new structured open data portal for gov data

Captricity (http://captricity.com), an award-winning Berkeley, CA–based company that offers a completely web-based data entry service for digitizing paper forms, is today announcing the launch of its Open Data Portal (http://captricity.com/opendata).

Data – structured, digital data that can be queried and analyzed – is an incredibly valuable resource. Captricity already helps organizations and corporations access important data trapped on paper. Their Open Data Portal takes that one step further, allowing users to easily share this structured data publicly. Open data goes beyond the status quo of transparency, where mountains of scans and PDFs are posted online but important information remains locked away in their pages. Captricity now unlocks the actual data and offers a tool as simple as a blog to share that data publicly.

Captricity is calling for public data set submissions from government agencies and departments, as well as anyone else holding important data. Consider how your agency or constituents could benefit from genuinely sharing public data: increased collaboration, accountability, and civic engagement. Send inquiries to [email protected].

Sample data sets are already available in the Open Data Portal (http://captricity.com/opendata). The very first demonstrates how the portal works with a fun example: an excerpt from the 1940 census, featuring Martin Luther King Jr as a child, Elvis, Warren Buffet, Chuck Norris, Clint Eastwood, Morgan Freeman, Johnny Cash, Albert Einstein and even the then-President of the United States, FDR. Check it out here, and see if you can spot all the celebrities. Learn how much the President made in 1940, and how many siblings “The King” had.