Cook County

Cook County Burial Locations Featured on WBEZ

Smart Chicago

On October 27, Cook County Chief Medical Examiner was on WBEZ’s Afternoon Shift talking about their burial data. 

The data set  lists the final disposition sites of the indigents buried by the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office. Currently, there are two places where this happens. Homewood Memorial Gardens Cemetery (which provides Latitude and Longitude coordinates for burials) and Mount Olivet (which provides Grave, Lot, and Block locations.)

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The data set provides the name, age, sex, race, date of death, and case number for each person buried by Cook County.

Our consultant, Josh Kalov worked with the Cook County Medical Examiner’s office to help set up the tables for the data set. He then educated the Medical Examiner’s office on how to upload data to the portal and made the first initial upload.

You can listen to the WBEZ story here. 

Updated Cook County Data Sets: Annual Salaries and Lobbyist Data

Christopher Whitaker

328px-Seal_of_Cook_County,_Illinois.svgHere’s a quick update on some new data sets released by Cook County. The first set is the annual salaries and lobbyist data for Cook County.

Previously, Lobbyist Activity was one of two datasets from the Clerk’s office that had been updating automatically for the past couple years. At some point the Lobbyist Activity script broke and it started updating the dataset with blank rows. Josh Kalov brought the updating issue to the attention of the Clerk’s IT staff, the team had a call with the consultants about the update script. They ended up rewriting the script with SODA2 (Socrata’s API) and Kalov has been monitoring the dataset to see if it updates correctly. So far, the dataset has been updating normally.

Incomplete List of Cook County Property Data Tools

Smart Chicago

328px-Seal_of_Cook_County,_Illinois.svgAs we continue our work on our Cook County Open Data project,  we are exploring already existing tools for interacting with Cook County Government data. Josh Kalov created this directory of ones that may be useful. Over the next several months we will do tutorials and write more information about many of these. As we work to add more raw data and update existing data, it’s important to see and use the vastly helpful tools that the County has invested in to allow residents to learn more about property.

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OpenGov Hack Night: Building a vision for a transit future (Part One)

Christopher Whitaker
This presentation was rather long-ish, so we’ve split this into two posts. The first one has to do with the Transit Future policy itself. 

On the April 15th OpenGov Hack Night, Ed Oser with Center for Neighborhood Technologies and OpenCity Apps presented their work on both the Transit Future plan and the web app that shows it off.

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