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Singapore's open data portal (data.gov.sg)
123 points by Rifu on Sept 29, 2015 | hide | past | favorite | 8 comments



Neat. San Francisco is big on this as well.

https://data.sfgov.org

(.sg URL is most definitely a coincidence. ;)


<meta name="generator" content="ckan 2.3" />

Good to see ckan used again in this space. It's really gaining a lot of users.


It wouldn't shock me if majority of Asian exports were limited to ASEAN countries. Regional economic cooperation pact has done wonders for the region. Despite sporadic political unrest, these countries have flourished.

Similar pacts can work great for South Asia, if Pakistan and India could just get their shit together.


The minister even came to geekcamp.sg to announce it.

https://www.facebook.com/Vivian.Balakrishnan.Sg/posts/101530...


Copied from my comment when this was posted to r/Singapore subreddit

- The source indicates the site is generated using CKAN (http://ckan.org/). Never heard of it myself, but it is F/OSS, and widely used in other countries. Great to see the government adopt open source software

- The homepage loads 2MB+ without a primed cache, and 600KB+ with, which is really high. The site pulls down a lot of JS - jQuery with a gazillion plugins, Bootstrap, DataTables, Select2, d3.js, and Moment.js.

- The icons are in SVG, which is good, but some of them are really badly optimized - this icon (http://beta.data.gov.sg/uploads/group/2015-06-12-061106.9773...) for the environment category is 128KB (!) which is an absolutely monster for a SVG. The equivalent PNG file will be much smaller.

- The site is not accessible at all over HTTPS - it doesn't even redirect, but just keeps the client waiting until the client times out. It's 2015 - I'd expect government sites to be accessible over HTTPS.

- The favicon is not the icon, for some reason. I really like the design of the icon, although I'm not entirely sure if it is the best fit for the data site. I can see it being used for as a single brand for all government websites though

- Fonts on almost everything need to be made bigger. The graph labels are so small I need to squint.

- The new API looks very very neat. Much more usable than the old one. The documentation can be better, and perhaps should be more front and center, but I guess they need to balance the needs of developers with casual visitors and non-developers. Love the graphs automatically drawn by d3.js for appropriate datasets

- Data is licensed under CC-by, which is quite nice.

A few interesting data sets:

- Amount of mobile data used quarterly: http://beta.data.gov.sg/dataset/mobile-data-usage - Singapore has one of the highest mobile device ownership rates in the world - on average, each resident own more than one mobile phone

- Singapore's total land area since independence: http://beta.data.gov.sg/dataset/total-land-area-of-singapore - Singapore has been constantly reclaiming land since independence

- Number of licensed supermarkets: http://beta.data.gov.sg/dataset/licensed-food-establishments...

- Daily public transport ridership: http://beta.data.gov.sg/dataset/public-transport-utilisation...


> - Singapore's total land area since independence: http://beta.data.gov.sg/dataset/total-land-area-of-singapore - Singapore has been constantly reclaiming land since independence

That chart could really use being anchored at 0 km^2 on the y axis.


It's impressive to see this level of transparency


Video feedback (from an expat who lives there) on the Singapore's data portal https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOSHPc2j9Ho




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