Resources

Chicago Data Portal

The largest collection of Chicago data... anywhere

The Chicago Data Portal is a portal through which government data can be easily accessed for anyone with access, created in 2012 by executive order of Governor Rahm Emanuel. The portal contains over 600 datasets about a diverse set of Chicago topics, including education, environment, health and human services, and more. Some examples datasets include: potholes, every Uber and Lyft ride in the city, every reported crime from 2001 to the present, and many more.

The Data Portal is updated daily with new and updated figures on its various sets. In addition, the City of Chicago has made a concerted effort to ensure that every dataset is both human-readable and machine-readable—that is, you can read over a polished presentation of the dataset for yourself or use your own custom computer program to read, analyze, and build off of the publicly available information. The motivation behind the Data Portal is to provide easy access to important data so people in Chicago can improve their communities. One example, chicagoflushots.org, created a website off the back of this public data to better educate the greater Chicago area on local flu shot availability.

To see some sample projects using the Chicago Data Portal, check out the City of Chicago's Github for some examples. For a more in-depth exploration of the different ways the Data Portal can be used for the good of your community, check out our event with the principle architect of the Data Portal, Tom Schenk Jr. For more on how to utilize that data, see our event with Nico Marchio of the Mansueto Institute on data visualization.

Check out some of the Data Portal's most fascinating datasets