In September 2020, the Dallas City Council voted to create the Office of Data Analytics and Business Intelligence (DBI) in order to make Dallas a more data driven city. Dallas City Manager, Mr. T.C. Broadnax described the purpose of DBI as, "to harness the City’s data, to enhance essential service delivery, and to affect systemic policies which directly impact the residents of Dallas, including but not limited to inequities resulting from policy decisions and outcomes of budget allocations.”

DBI leads the effort of publishing data, and data stories, and maintaining and refreshing existing spatial and non-spatial data. While DBI champions data transparency and ease of data access, we are also mindful of protecting sensitive data and information. We created and maintain this portal to make City of Dallas data available to the public in a user-friendly format.

Open data is content or data that is openly and freely available to anyone with access to the internet. Open data is typically published in electronic formats and should be readable by a computer. Most data files published on the Dallas Open Data Portal are City of Dallas generated data. Data published is refreshed on regular basis (please refer to the metadata portion for more information on data refresh frequency).

Open data can be a useful tool to help produce new and valuable services and products. Specifically, the Dallas Open Data Portal encourages citizen participation through online access to datasets. It conveys transparency, trust, and accountability to the public while protecting sensitive data and information.

Interacting with a dataset can be a daunting task especially without prior knowledge or usage. The Dallas Open Data Portal provides user videos https://dallas-staging.data.socrata.com/videos to guide visitors as they navigate through the datasets that interest them.

It is common to have questions when browsing through datasets and the open data portal. For your convenience Dallas Open Data Portal has provided a FAQ page, which can be reached through the following link: https://www.dallasopendata.com/stories/s/Dallas-ODP-FAQs/f7vs-a4ap/ , to help viewers attain answers to questions you may have.

Contact us if you have any questions, comments, or feedback.