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I’ve been having some discussions with people at the Chicago Open Government group, talking about data openness. One common complaint all around is about data exported as PDFs. The particular topic we were discussing was TIFs. TIFs (Tax Increment Financing) are something a city can use to try to improve a neighborhood, and fund the improvements with the increased tax revenue from rising property values in those neighborhoods. These are used in many cities, and seem generally surrounded by an air of controversy.
Chicago in particular recently passed a law to open up TIF information. How the data is opened up isn’t specified that closely, and probably will be via published PDFs, along with some shape files to define the neighborhoods. (Shape files seem relatively easy to attain, probably because they are already most easily managed electronically.)
There was some vague talk about opening up the data as XML… but what would that even mean? To be fair to the city, the TIFs are actually defined by documents, and a PDF is a relatively accurate representation.
In general this idea of “XML” is confusing. XML is just a syntax for holding structured data. But there’s no particular structure that this data should conform to. There is MathML for talking about mathematical equations. There is KML for geographical information. But there’s no TIFML, no PolicyML, no GovernmentML. Though, somewhat surprisingly to me, there is a government sponsored StrategyML and what appears to be an aborted attempt at PlanningML. I have reservations about any markup language, which I’ll discuss below, but if people want these documents in StrategyML then that would mean something, XML is not that meaningful.
What is the purpose of opening up TIF data? Maybe:
- See how much money is redirected to the TIF
- See what that money is used for
- See any measurable outcomes of the TIF
- See the TIF charter, the document identifying what purpose the TIF is supposed to serve
There is some budgeting data that would be an excellent candidate for a structured presentation. But a substantial portion of the information is not structured. The charter has no structure, it is a narrative document. It is also essential context to understanding anything else. You can’t say that the budget is too big or that any one item is wasteful, except in relation to the purpose of the TIF, and that charter defines the purpose. A TIF zone set up to encourage tourism should be managed much differently than a zone where they are fighting urban blight, or encouraging light industry, or pursuing transit-oriented development.
Also there is the simple question of fact. A TIF is a political entity, set up by politicians, and it is a formal agreement. All the people involved work with documents. They do not write markup. The document means what was on paper. Extracting underlying semantics is not true to the process itself. (In this I am quite influenced by the principles of Microformats.)
So, what to do? The answer I see is one of annotation, not structure. The document should be posted in as accessible a manner as can also be accurate. HTML, preferably as simple as possible, is an excellent candidate, nearly as representative as PDF but more accessible (though PDF allows you to guard against OCR errors by keeping the original scan more present). From there portions of the document should be tagged. If there is a commitment from the city, tag it as such. If there is an expected outcome, tag that. Make the document easy to reference in granular pieces, so people can discuss the details.
At some point there’s either a story worth telling with the data, or there isn’t. The story may be one of success, or one of corruption, or simply one that puts TIF financing in context with a city budget. But there’s no one answer about what you will get out of this information. You can’t dump all this data into a computer and tell it how well things are going. Structure involves a rebuilding of the data, but when we don’t know why we want to rebuild the data, when we don’t know what we want to know, I believe the more distributed notion of annotation is a better fit.
If I had to guess, what people really want “opened” about TIFs is the transactional information. I will admit to not really knowing what the original TIF charters have to offer us, unless it’s just a backstop to justify or criticize budget expenditures.
That said, HTML is much better than PDFs, which are much better than pages in a filing cabinet in a dark corner of an agency office.
The one thing that XML has over any other data format is an ability (when people do it right) to be precise about character encoding. XML Schemas are also useful when you have data which may be generated from many sources but at this stage, I expect that each government entity has been doing things in its own idiosyncratic way, and the effort to try to push conformity to an external standard would just become a quagmire
Given my predilection for IETF style “rough consensus and running code,” I advocate for simple tabular data (clearly documented) as the format with the least obstacles to getting it out and into the world. Then, after real world experience has been gathered by people building things, we’ll be able to make informed suggestions about how to move towards a common standard that fits the data and the things we want to do with it.
My buddy Adam dug through all those PDFs and put together a TIF map for Chicago last summer: http://news.medill.northwestern.edu/chicago/news.aspx?id=92881 Click “View Larger Map” to find the url for the KML file he used to make it happen. I’m pretty sure he also found a shapefile for the data, but only after hand-entering everything.
(He also made a couple of delightful cartoons to explain TIFs to the youngsters, TIFs for Tots http://news.medill.northwestern.edu/chicago/news.aspx?id=94075 and Where do TIFs Come From? http://news.medill.northwestern.edu/chicago/news.aspx?id=99489)
Seems to me that the most useful format would be shapefiles, paired with, like Joe said, well-documented tabular data. With that, a non-programmer could explore the data in a spreadsheet and GIS tools, and the nerds could consume it in PostGIS for exploration and presentation.
Also agreed w/ Joe that more interesting than shapes is the transactional information. I would like to see how these things progress over time… how much was allocated when, and for what reason. That’s the real news — why the devil does this TIF exist, and what’s been going on w/ it?
The data entry involved with watching over TIFs is obnoxious and unnecessary. PDFs get exported as images instead of usable text. Also there are no databases or spreadsheets for TIF financial data, so you have to go through each report, entering all numbers by hand. Fixing this is the biggest single issue.
A great TIF resource did exist here in Chicago, but the group behind it ran out of funding two years ago. However their TIF database was excellent (still is, though not up to date) http://www.ncbg.org/tifs/tiflist.aspx
Finally, the city does put up contracts and payments made within TIF districts online. However the site, like the City of Chicago’s site as a whole, is a total mess. The database is not searchable by TIF district and you need to know the exact name of the company to the letter for it to return any search hits. Flawed as it might be, you can check out the contracts database here: http://webapps.cityofchicago.org/VCSearchWeb/org/cityofchicago/vcsearch/controller/agencySelection/begin.do
I’m glad to see that Chicago will be putting up more TIF data online, but it being Chicago, I’m just waiting to see how they screw it up.
Oh and I forgot to add, the Shapefiles for TIFs can be found here: http://egov.cityofchicago.org:80/city/webportal/portalContentItemAction.do?BV_SessionID=@@@@0372528720.1243702678@@@@&BV_EngineID=ccccadehgjkeejlcefecelldffhdfhk.0&contentOID=536900083&contenTypeName=COC_EDITORIAL&topChannelName=SubAgency&blockName=Geographic+Information+Systems%2FGIS+Data%2FI+Want+To&context=dept&channelId=0&programId=0&entityName=Geographic+Information+Systems&deptMainCategoryOID=-536886491
(If that doesn’t work, as cityofchicago.org URLs often don’t, you can find by googling “Chicago GIS”).
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