Skip to Content

LA Chief Data Officer

Shared the Experience of LA GeoHub

Lilian Coral, Chief Data Officer of the city of Los Angeles, shared how the city gathers and utilizes spatial open data through LA GeoHub, a public platform of location-based Open Data, in Internet Economy Summit held in Hong Kong on 11 April 2017.

 

Lilian Coral explained how LA GeoHub transforms open data into organizational wisdom which in turn drives a smarter Los Angeles.

 

 

LA GeoHub is powered by Esri’s GIS technologies. It transforms the city’s geographic data into a location-as-a-service platform, allowing internal users to access more city data, and external users to develop innovative services and apps based on the real-time data. Therefore City council staffs, businesses, app developers, non-profit organizations and the public can create value from the city’s location-based information, like traffic blackspots, temporary road closures and accidents.

 

Through an open data policy and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), the public is encouraged to build mobile apps for facilitate information sharing. Ms. Coral noted that the city hoped to boost the creativity of citizens and relieve problems brought by economic downturn and climate change.

 

Street Wize is one of the apps that based on GeoHub. It allows users residents to track current and upcoming road opening permits and construction activities around the city so they can plan accordingly to avoid delays. Another app called Vision Zero uses a data driven approach to alert citizens of traffic accidents so that traffic related injuries and deaths can be reduced. In addition, the Clean Streets Index allows the public to rate the cleanliness of streets in LA on electronic map so that the government departments can make strategic resources deployment accordingly. As a result, the street cleanliness was improved significantly.

 

 

Hundreds of attendees listened to the sharing of Ms. Coral in Smart City for Better Living Forum of Internet Economy Summit.

 

 

The GeoHub also allows the introduction of the Mayor’s Dashboard. It visualizes a collection of updated public concern items such as unemployment rate, job vacancies, public service hotline response time and crime rate of Los Angeles. Thus the Dashboard serves as a foundation for the public to monitor and interact with the Government on how the City is doing to improve city services, enhance people’s quality of life, foster economy, etc. In addition, the Mayor and Government departments can also make decisions and prioritize actions based on the Dashboard.

 

In recent years, Hong Kong is actively building itself into a smarter city and the experience of LA GeoHub can serve as an important reference on promotion of open data and drafting of related policies.