CypherPhilly Kick-Off - Data-driven Journalism Using OpenDataPhilly & Neo4j

The Idea:

Philly Graph DB, Code for Philly and Data Philly meetup groups are starting a new initiative called Cypher Philly. The initiative is intended to inspire and equip citizen journalists, data enthusiasts and social activists with the tools and data to do good for the city and citizens of Philadelphia. There are a number of reasons why Philadelphia needs your help from public safety issues to beautifying shared public spaces, transportation updates or even unheard police complaints. Our goal is to harness the untapped potential of www.OpenDataPhilly.org which has hundreds of datasets that could help inform effective solutions to these problems. Topics range from Arts/Culture/History, Education, Elections/Politics, Transportation, Public Safety, Environment & and much more. With a shared enthusiasm for making an actionable difference we believe you can help us make this initiative possible.

The Code:

Cypher Philly's first priority is to build web application tools which contributors can use collaboratively. These tools will help us to query the data were working with and allow us to share the results we’ve discovered. The Cypher Philly web application tool can be found on our Github page (https://github.com/AddictiveSci/cypherphilly) and is completely open source, so anyone can contribute to the code. Each new project that is spawned from this initiative will get its own web page.

The Data:

Additionally we need data experts to help in many aspects. Once a problem is identified by the journalist and a topic chosen to explore, we’ll need data experts to start the data preparation phase. Wherein the data will need to be cleaned and modeled to fit the search parameters set out by the journalists to tell a story. Afterwards the prepared datasets will be imported into the Cypher Philly project main databases. Your next task will be to set up query parameters for using Cypher Philly Neo4j Graph Database (https://neo4j.com/) web application and the Cypher Query language (https://neo4j.com/cypher-graph-query-language/) to query the data. After the datasets are queried for each project, results will be displayed on the Cypher Philly website either in a visual, categorical, quantitative or any combination that helps tell the story of the data. The data findings from each project will then be summarized in conjunction with the journalist in order to draw conclusions from the results and build recommendations for actionable steps moving forward.

Journalism:

Most importantly we need Philadelphia journalists and citizens to help us identify problems that are most relevant to the data we have from Open Data Philly. Once we’ve identified the problems and datasets we’ll be working with, we’ll work with data scientists to determine what parts of the data are most relevant to telling the story. When the data scientists have concluded their analysis and published their findings; we’ll need journalists to tell the stories we find in the data and how we can use this information to make actionable change.