Exploring Toronto 311 calls Part1: Why people are calling?

Toronto 311Service Request - Customer Initiated contains information on on customer initiated service requests received by the city of Toronto for Solid Waste Management, Transportation Services, Toronto Water, Municipal Licensing & Standards, and Urban Forestry related request.

In the April session of the Toronto OpenRefine Meetup we took an hour to explore the data set and prepare it to map in using Google Fusion Table. For this example we will use only the 2015 calls available to this date:  from January 1st to March 31. Download it from here: http://opendata.toronto.ca/311/service.request/SR2015.zip


The 311 Service Request - Customer Initiated data set have three fields:

• CREATION DATE 
• SERVICE REQUEST LOCATION 
• SERVICE REQUEST TYPE

In this first article we will explore the relationship between the type of request and its creation date.

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Data exploration tutorial with google refine

Recently, Hugh Stimson published a great article: Data Mining My Old Radio Playlists. His post mix tutorials on php scripting, data cleaning with google refine and data analysis with PostgreSQL.

This answer post demonstrate that data analysis is fully doable in google refine using really basic function (I'll be using GREL function only once for the long tail analysis). I guess also this post is a good illustration of my previous post on data exploration using google refine.

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Use google refine to navigate data solely (facet, filter, flag)

Google refine can also be used to solely navigate and explore data without editing them. I find it very useful to explore large data-set thanks to its good user interface, this avoid to develop a specific one to visualize data. In this post I will present the three mains option to interact with the data: facet, text filer and flags.

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