Welcome to the Socrata Support Portal

Stay updated with announcements, get answers from the community, and share your feature suggestions with us.
You can also submit a trouble ticket or send us an email at support@socrata.com. We strive to respond to all service requests within one business day.

Support is also available by phone from 9AM to 5PM Pacific at (206) 340-8008, extension 3.

For current status of all Socrata-powered sites, see our status page at status.socrata.com

To learn more about the Socrata platform, please visit www.socrata.com.

 
 

Socrata Support

Cam Caldwell December 10, 2012 Knowledge Base / How do I...?

Want to ensure that your Socrata Open Data site looks great and serves as many people as possible? Follow these 10 tips from Socrata’s Client Services team:

  1. Create a great first impression with a nicely styled logo. Your logo appears on every page; make sure it conveys professionalism.
  2. Tell visitors about your site at a glance with a tagline. Use a few well-chosen words tell your site’s story.
  3. Make “Help” accessible with a handy link. Encourage your users to get the most out of their data experience.
  4. Engage your developer community with a prominent link. Encouraging developers to build applications with your data makes your site more interesting and valuable.
  5. Make it easy for visitors to go to your main site from every page. And don’t forget to put a link on your main site back to your Open Data site.
  6. Use a hero banner to draw attention to important information. Use the “Stories” feature to create a series of rotating panels that highlight interesting news and events.
  7. Dress up your featured datasets with eye-catching icons. Clean, modern icons improve the look of your site.
  8. Draw your visitors to your featured datasets with titles and summary text. Grab your users’ attention with interesting titles and teaser text.
  9. Control the look of your home page by making it fixed width. Have a predictable display no matter what window size your visitor uses. You can still have full-width interior pages to make detailed data easier to view.
  10. Invite participation by including a “Suggest a Dataset” button. Find out what data consumers are interested in and add value to your site.

Style_Tips.png

Melissa Parsons November 30, 2012 Knowledge Base / How do I...?

Introducing the Release of the New Maps Functionality


Socrata is releasing a major update to our maps functionality to help data-sharing organizations and their users tell their stories and help correlations come into focus. 

These improvements enhance the performance, reliability and consistency across several types of maps plus they provide a powerful new layering feature that we call "map mashups."

 

Maps of the Past and Future

Existing Maps: Behaviors across the three major map providers (Google, Bing, and ESRI) are now streamlined into one consistent model. What you can do for one type of map, you can do on all map types. Compared to the previous release of maps, there is a significant increase in the amount of control you have over the appearance of your maps.

Map Mashups –  Through map mashups, multiple datasets can be layered onto the same base map within one domain. For example, point maps showing New York’s police and fire stations can be overlaid with a heat map of New York’s crime patterns, all layered onto the same Google Street Map. In these types of maps, each row of a dataset is a point on the map. 

Mondara: As an extension of map mashups, Mondara shapefiles can also be layered with onto maps. Shapefiles describe polygon boundaries of regions, like neighborhoods, precincts, zones, and much more. Layering point data on top of geospatial shapefiles offers an addition, useful perspective on datasets, such as seeing trends by neighborhood.

 

Example of Data Layers on a Map

Now let’s demonstrate how to make layered maps from multiple datasets using the following map of San Francisco:

1.png

This map shows data depicting graffiti incidents, illegal dumping reports, and abandoned vehicle requests in San Francisco, CA from 2008-2011. See it here: https://opendata.socrata.com/dataset/Graffiti-Illegal-Dumping-Abandoned-Vehicles/ddw2-sh7t

Creating a Map

New maps functionality will be rolled out to Socrata customers in December of 2012. Please contact Socrata’s support portal with any questions or concerns : http://support.socrata.com/anonymous_requests/

For instructions on how to upload your datasets and how to make a single-layer map out of geo-spatial data, please see our compiled list of articles and videos in the following Knowledge Base article: How do I get started with my Socrata site?

1. Working with your maps

From the example above, the following individual maps have already been created as separate layers. 

1.a.  Open Abandoned Vehicle Requests in San Francisco:

2.png

(https://opendata.socrata.com/dataset/Open-Abandoned-Vehicle-Requests-2/ctw4-c8if

 

1.b.  Illegal Dumping in San Francisco:

3.png

(https://opendata.socrata.com/Government/Illegal-Dumping-Map/9dh6-ijv4)

 

1.c.   Heat Map showing areas of graffiti in San Francisco:

4.png

(https://opendata.socrata.com/dataset/Map-showing-areas-of-graffiti-in-San-Francisco/4zng-tydu)

 

2. Mashing Up Maps

Let’s use map 1.a as our “Base Layer.”

Starting from the first map, you can expand two different panels to configure the look and feel of the datapoints from the ‘Layer Summary’ button and ‘Visualize’ tab:

5.png

Under ‘Layer Summary,’ you’ll see the Base Layers available (this is specific to Google). In this case, Google maps provides three different layer types: roadmap, satellite, or terrain view.  You can choose which one to use for the map, and how opaque you want that underlying map to be from 0-100, 100 being fully saturated. The opacity of the data points will remain the same; only the map behind them will change.

We talk about how to customize these layer options a little further below.

Here’s a look at what your layer choice does:

6.png

 

Under ‘Data Layers,’ you can see which data set(s) you’re currently viewing, the opacity of the data points, what information from the dataset the points rely on (‘CASE ID’ in this case) and the color scheme:

7.png

 

(Note that we use the term ‘dataset’ to encompass both datasets and views of datasets in our maps interface).

Under the ‘Visualize’ tab, ‘Map’ drop-down, there is a ‘Dataset Summary’: this displays the dataset(s) name and offers an ‘edit’ feature. Click on ‘edit’ and this will trigger a popup, as shown:

8.png

This popup allows you to ‘Choose’ any dataset you have in your catalog and edit that dataset/view in a separate tab of your browser. *This feature is specifically handy for editing the dataset you’re currently viewing in another tab.

In the ‘Dataset Summary,’ you can also ‘Add Data’; this triggers a similar popup to the ‘edit’ configuration, but when you ‘Choose’ a dataset, this dataset will be added to your current view.

 

Say we use ‘Add Data’ to add maps #2 and #3 from above:

9.png

(Notice how the ‘Dataset Summary’ reflects the added data and the ‘Layer Summary’ displays the new dataset under ‘Data Layers' in the map above).

 

There is a separate ‘Config’ for each, separate dataset, displaying the name and unique identifier for that dataset (the XXXX-XXXX value unique to every dataset and found appended at the end of every dataset’s URL):

10.png

This configuration includes:

Plot style: select whether you’d like a Point, Boundary, or Heat map style for the specified dataset

Location: select the name of the column of data you want to use for mapping locations for the specified dataset

 

Each dataset has an ‘Advanced Config’ option. If the dataset is in the form of a Heat Map, the following advanced configuration options will render:

11.png

 

Alternatively, if the dataset is in the form of a Point or Boundary Map, the following advanced configuration options will render:

12.png

 

Here, you can customize...

‘Base Color’: customize the color of the data you display for a specific dataset

‘Point Size’: select which column in the dataset you want to determine the size of your data points (for example, selecting a Latitude column will result in larger data points the further North they sit)

‘Point Color’: select the column of data you want the opacity of the data points to depend on (for example, using ‘Case ID’ will result in darker data point colors where the Case ID has lower values and lighter point colors where the case ID has higher values)

‘Icon’: if you have a column with images in your dataset that you’d like to serve as icons for your data points, select that column here.

If you have car icons, for example,, your map might look something like this:

13.png

 

As demonstrated by a Seattle Resources Map, you can use icons to bring your data to life in a very simply manner:

14.png

(https://opendata.socrata.com/dataset/Seattle-Resources-Map-ESRI-/mz8h-khd5)

 

You can also configure your icons in the ‘Conditional Formatting’ dropdown of the ‘Visualize’ tab:

15.png

 

You can also customize the Flyout Configuration ‘Title’ and ‘Flyout Details’: choose which column of the dataset you want to serve as the title of the flyout (the summary data that opens when a data point is selected) and add as many additional flyout details you’d like to include. You can do this by clicking on the ‘Add Flyout Details’ button.

16.png

 

The ‘Base Maps’ section:

17.png

 

You can customize those ‘Base Layers’ we talked about earlier under the ‘Layer Summary’; it’s up to you if you want only one, more, or many more layers to choose from in your final map view.  Let’s see what happens when you set two layers, customize their names/aliases, and customize the default opacity:

18.png

(Notice how these choices reflect in the ‘Base Layers’ of the ‘Layer Summary')

 

The final customization under ‘Visualize,’ is called ‘Advanced Configuration.’ This is unrelated to the ‘Advanced Configs' of each dataset; instead, this is a configuration for your entire map view. You can choose whether or not you want your ‘Base Layers’ to be exclusive and whether or not you want your color legend(s) to be displayed at the bottom of the map. 

19.png                             20.png

 

All done? Click ‘Apply’: if all required fields are filled, this will apply and display the changes you’ve made.

Hopefully you feel relatively comfortable with our maps, and more importantly, hopefully you enjoy working with them.

 

 

Cam Caldwell November 28, 2012 Announcements

Socrata University
New Webinars Announced

 

Join us for these informative webinars from Socrata University.

A Layer Revolution: Fitting More into Every Map 

Thursday, December 6th
9am - 10am PST 

Want your users to get more out of maps? So do we. 

Listen in as map design engineer Lilia Gutnik and geodata specialist Bryant Lau explain our latest enhancements to maps, including:

  • How layering multiple, geospatial datasets provides helpful context for the user
  • What types of dataset work best on a map
  • How our new maps features save you money and time - and boosts user engagement 

Register Now

Socrata University 201: Beyond the Basics

Thursday, January 17th
11am - 12:30pm PST 

If you are ready to move to a higher level of expertise, join implementation specialist Darrell Cabales for our Socrata University 201 course. You’ll learn how to:

  • Create more advanced visualizations
  • Use high-level administrative features for greater efficiency
  • Distribute your data across the web by embedding the Social Data Player

 Register Now

 

Sincerely,

The Socrata Team

Cam Caldwell October 31, 2012 1 Announcements

Socrata Customers-

We are experiencing issues with our platform-wide with our analytics services that reports site usage metrics.  We expect to have our back end servers repaired, without data loss, by 11/2.  From there we will be migration to the new servers which will occur over the next week.

 

Update as of 11/9:  The back-end servers have all been repaired! All the sitewide data as been migrated into the new datastore, and the metrics on individual datasets is actively being migrated and should be fully complete by 11/19.

Clare Zimmerman July 05, 2012 Announcements

In case you missed it, want to watch it again, or share it with your colleagues, you can now view the recording from our June 26th Socrata University's 101 webinar:

View Recording

This webinar provided an introduction to Open Data and how to use Socrata's Open Data Platform. Topics that were covered included basic site training, data publishing, data visualizations, and data embedding, as well as examples of current open data sites and some of the apps that have been built using the data.

If you have any further questions check out the various support articles in the Knowledge Base section or contact us.

We will have the next Socrata 101 on Tuesday July 10th, so come with your questions and we look forward to speaking to you then!