How do I get questions answered that aren't on this list?
Email data@cdc.gov and that mailbox is monitored by Brian and Linda. When they answer your question, they'll probably add it to this list.
As a new Data.CDC.gov user, where should I start?
Socrata publishes a series of 60-second videos for publishing and accessing data that apply to our site. And they have a useful set of tutorial articles on each function. If you had to pick a single tutorial, I would start with Using the Socrata Data Management Experience for data publishers and Creating a Visualization in the Visualization Canvas for everyone else.
What is Open Data?
OMB Memo M-13-13 Open Data Policy defines open data as "publicly available data structured in a way that enables the data to be fully discoverable and usable by end users." (p5) with seven principles of public, described, accessible, reusable, complete, timely, managed post-release. Note that there are other, more broad definitions used by other communities (eg OpenDefinition) but Open Data used by CDC will refer to the OMB definition unless otherwise noted.
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Data Validation Tools
- Goodtables.py - "a framework to validate tabular data. It can check the structure of your data (e.g. all rows have the same number of columns), and its contents (e.g. all dates are valid)."
List of Socrata Tutorials That I've Found Helpful
- Featured Content For The Data Catalog - How to update categories with featured content items.
- Using The Platform - How to open up and work with data sets in lots of tools (Tableau, R, Plotly, PowerBI, etc.).
- Data Visualization - How to work with data sets specifically for visualization.
- Locating The API Docs for a Dataset - How to work with the Socrata API for each dataset.
- Access Socrata Data Using OData - Specifically through the Open Data Protocol API standard.
- Metadata API - How to read the data about data sets via an API.
- Socrata "Primer" A Dataset's Landing Page - How to navigate around each data set's landing page.
- Web Interface for dataset upload - How to upload data sets manually through the web.
- Updating datasets using working copies - Use temporary, private versions of data sets to edit and update, review and clear, and then publish to make visible to data set users.
- Creating a Filtered View - How to create filters and sorts on data sets.
- Utah Department of Transportation Socrata Help Resources - collection of helpful tutorials put together by Utah for their Socrata open data portal