Partners: University of Baltimore, Towson University  

The proposed project will provide open opportunities to learn about and evaluate a number of open data portal technologies for publishing data for smart cities and data science for social good. The proposed work will build on the Baltimore Data Science Corps NSF HDR project and will develop a number of use cases for serving open data for smart city and urban data applications. The use cases will then be demonstrated on a set of open data hub technologies such as the ESRI Open Data Portal, CKAN, DKAN, and DataVerse. The project will establish criteria to evaluate technology to publish open data and through established use cases that aligned with the South Big Data Hub priorities, technologies will be implemented and tested on their ability to provide end-to-end support for smart city and urban data science problems. The resulting data will be used in hackathons and competitions within Baltimore and results will be presented at the Baltimore Data Day workshop. The project will engage stakeholders at the South Big Data Hub and will be a model for publishing and using open data for smart cities and data science for social good.

The results of the proposed work will have broader impacts in a number of ways including:

1. the proposed work will serve as a test bed for the implementation of open data science portals and will be able to be applied in other cities in the South Big Data Hub Region and beyond;
2. the criteria for the evaluation of open data portal technology, use cases, and functional requirements will be developed collaboratively with experts in the South Big Data Hub and will serve the purposes of organizations beyond this project;
3. webinars and symposia will be accessible to a wide audience to increase awareness and understanding of open data portal products;
4. the resulting open data portal will be used in data science challenges for students in and beyond the Baltimore region; 
5. the South Big Data Hub Ambassador funded as part of this project will perform outreach activities and will work with groups outside of the Baltimore-DSC to bring a group of scientists interested in the use of open data portal technology for smart cities and data science for social good.