Starting to compile and distribute information about the tools, systems and sources for Watertown, MA data. Thanks to http://hacktyler.com/data for the inspiration.
Crime
- Programatic Access: None exists
- Current Access: Paper based, in-person, non-structured
- IMC Computer Aided Dispatch system from Tyler Technologies contains incident level information: http://www.tritech.com/products/imc-solutions/imc-cad
- Proprietary visualization tool but the copyright surrounding incident data makes personal use off limits: http://www.crimereports.com
- Rolled up statistics provided by the Police Department that are not very useful: http://www.watertownpd.org/statistics/stats.html
Fire & Emergency
- Uses the same IMC cad system
- Unstructured and difficult to use PDFs can be found at the Massachuesetts Fire Incident Reporting System
Education
- HTML based Massachusetts Department of Education school district profiles provide useful information but are a challenge to interact with programmatically. I wrote some scripts to retrieve and scrape the data from their website.
Financial
- The Massachusetts Department of Revenue Databank provides a number of Excel spreadsheets that have to be downloaded. The data provided in the documents is great, but requires Google Refine to do much with them.
- The Watertown, MA Document Center provides a number of very detailed budget documents but only as PDF documents. The website is extremely challenging to scrape for data.
GIS / Public Works
- An online GIS map for Watertown can be found at http://www.mapsonline.net/watertownma/ it doesn’t look like there is raw access to the information presented.
News
Real estate information
Miscellaneous
- See Click Fix
- I have a printed curbside trash and recycling pickup schedule at home but have yet to find one online. A google calendar for this would be nice.
