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layout: fullpage
title: Open
Data
Portals
pagetype: story
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published: true
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Chicago's open data portal provides user-friendly access to almost 600 datasets. The public can browse data in a spreadsheet-like format and create maps, and graphs. The data portal is also used by Chicago's vibrant civic-developer community to create helpful applications to connect the public to data.
Chicago has begun releasing select datasets on the City's GitHub account. These data are provided in a business-friendly MIT license and provide the civic-developer community a chance to propose edits and detect errors.
Chicago's data dictionary will display all metadata--data about data--on each dataset. While the data portal displays actual data, the data dictionary will provide a map for every database in the city, including data not published on the portal. The data dictionary is a key step to providing full transparency to the city's data.