Socrata and Open Data Architecture and

TechnologyEvan Chan

Principal Engineer

• Who is Socrata? • What’s Open Data? • The state of government IT • How Socrata Enables Open Data • The Socrata Architecture • Scaling our Architecture

Agenda

Who is Socrata?!We are a Seattle-based software startup. !We make data useful to everyone.

Open, Public Data

Consumers

Apps

Socrata is…

The most widely adopted Open Data platform

What is Open Data?

21st Century Government

• Lower the cost of healthcare • Improve education systems • Fight climate change • Improve city safety • Reduce the occurrences of crime • Reduce bureaucratic inefficiencies • Spur local innovation

Improved use of government data can:

Governments Want Their Data to be Open

• Fundamental belief that transparent government is better

• Push to modernize government through APIs • Belief that government data can be useful (think

health inspection data and Yelp, or 911 data and Zillow)

1. Geospatial Data 2. Public Safety Data

Traffic, Crime, Environmental, Complaints 3. Salary Data 4. Health Data 5. Expenditure Data 6. Education Data 7. Census Data 8. Parcel Property Data 9. Business Data 10.Locations of Government Services

Most Compelling Datasets

What is Socrata?

• Catalog to find datasets • Tools for easily importing and updating datasets • Simple data visualizations for exploring and showing

data • Reporting and application building environment

Who uses Socrata?

Laura – Local Resident “How safe is my neighborhood?”

Aaron – Community Advocate “I want to see trends in social housing.”

Dave – App Developer “I need real-time API access to 911 data.”

Dora – The Chief Data Officer ”How do we connect our data to the web?”

Pam – Mayor’s Office “How do we share data to make better decisions?”

Sammy – Department Head “I need to shift to self-service digital channels.”

External Data Consumers Government Data Publishers

Visualizations

Analysis

Discovery/SEO

Dashboards

Government Multilateral/NGO

Data Benchmarking / Prediction

Syndication to Consumer Web

Apps

Our Architecture

Information important to you

•Run our own datacenters (SEA/ORD)

•Javascript/Ruby on the frontend

•Java/Scala on the backend

•Postgres, Cassandra, Kafka, Chef

•Hard and novel problems to solve and new backends to explore...

Increase the flow of data

Drive mass consumption

browser datasync Client/API

customer data management system

file (CSV,.xls) API

dataset additions/updates

socrata load balancer

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1. Data is brought into the system. Datamay be brought in via direct file uploador by using the datasync client or api which maintains an efficient and robust transfer of the data.

2. Dataset additions, updates or deletes are communicated to the Socrata back end system across the Internet.

ingress

1. Data set update is routed to a request dispatcher. !2. The request dispatcher forwards the request to the data coordinator.

3. Data coordinator performs the data set addition or update.

4. The truth service adds or alters the data set. All primitive data types are addressed. The truth system gets annotations to the data set from the annotation service and applies them as appropriate. 5. Data coordinator informs all appropriate query services including information on the specific data needed.

6. Impacted query services retrieve the data.

ingress

understanding• data set level

– high level: health – more detailed:

• health/restaurant/inspection • health/disease/infectious

• columnar data types – e.g. location/name/city,

demographic/gender

• columnar schematic categories – e.g. crime_type, crimes from

Boston and Chicago datsets

• columnar schematic category classifications, e.g. (assault, assault and battery, violent assault) > assault

• pivot points – e.g. neighborhood, city, business

gold GT 1

crowdsourcer

GT

models

annotations truth

1. A trusted curator prepares a gold ground truth (GT) by manually labeling datasets.

2. The Gold GT is used by a CrowdSourcer system which coordinates jobs across untrusted distributed mechanical turk workers to annotate the Gold GT set. Annotation quality is assessed via the Gold GT.

3. The CrowdSourcer leverages the distributed humans to annotate much larger sets of datasets.

4. Machine learning models are trained against the GT and applied against a larger set of datasets. In addition, trained models are applied in the synchronous workflow described above.

5. Model based and crowd sourced annotations are stored in an annotation service.

6. The Truth system periodically queries the Knowledge system for the latest annotation mappings and applies them to its datasets.

7. Secondary services like Search are notified of changes. They pick them up and are now available for query.

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search

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annotations curator

socrata load balancer

app service platform

govstat budget core ux

browser

queries

api app 1. Citizens, reporters, and other users

access our core ux or apps via a browser.

2. Apps run on our app service platform and generate queries to our back end services as needed.

3. 3rd party developers build apps using our API which leverage back end services.

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query

1. query is routed to a request dispatcher !2. the request dispatcher’s query Coordinator first checks if the query is cached; if so, the cached copy is returned. !3. request dispatcher routes the query to the appropriate specialty subsytem to perform the query.

technologies

• db – postgres including postGIS – lucene/elastic search – spark:(sql, streaming) – cassandra (back end of govstat, dataset metrics)

• languages – scala, ruby, javascript, python

• platforms: – logging: sumo – build: jenkins – test: cucumber – cloud: (aws, azure, own) -> aws – machine learning: sklearn/scipy

1. Broad soda v.x api is made more efficient via techniques like rollup tables.

!1. Big gulp api is serviced

through specialized secondary Services. API is highly controlled; additions are made w/ a clear understanding of scale cost.

2. Big gulp api query breadth is expanded over time, as soda data and user throughput sizes are increased

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scaling strategy

ingress tp

1e11~100G

The SODA API

• Recently introduced a new version of our API

• Expressive, SQL-like language • Provides the base for all other

functionality • Provides the base for 3rd parties to

access data hosted by Socrata

SoQL

A REST-like SQL inspired API for accessing and querying datasets

DEMO!

How I feel using SoQL over HTTP

The Scala SODA Client

•Abstract away JSON parsing and types

•Scala-like query syntax

•Returns results as a Future

•Internally uses Iteratees to stream and parse results

WE ARE HIRING!evan.chan@socrata.com