Socrata is a category of cloud-based Web 2.0 solutions that enable federal, state, and local governments to dramatically improve the reach, usability and social utility of their public information assets. An organization trying to establish standards for data portability and vendor interoperability. A key goal of the Socrata open source strategy is to enable customers to rapidly accelerate the process of breaking data out of traditional enterprise database “silos,” moving it to the cloud and opening it for mass consumption to end users and developers.
The focus of the Community edition will be mainly the areas of Data portability and to bring Vendor interoperability. It strives to enable universal federation of different open data catalogs using a standard catalog schema, based on the W3C Data Catalog Vocabulary. The objective is to evolve towards standard schemas that developers can use for popular data sets by standardize outputs including JSON, XML, and CSV, as well as RDF and other Linked Data standards. Data portability can also be achieved by standardizing APIs that use established protocols to programmatically access open data.
The “Socrata Open Data Server, Community Edition” will be released in the first quarter of 2013, as free to download open source software and fully integrated with other components of the company’s commercial software products. Socrata’s mission is to help government organizations everywhere reap massive economic benefits from data liberation by promoting unfettered access, shareable, consumable and reuse of public data.
“Socrata is investing in an open source product because it will help us accelerate mainstream adoption of the open data cloud model as the de-facto enterprise data architecture. We envision a future where the 99 percent of data still locked up in legacy proprietary systems will be open and accessible to the masses,” says Kevin Merritt, Socrata’s Founder and CEO. “As the volume, variety and velocity of open data grow, the scalability, cost-savings, and end-to-end simplicity of our cloud-based platform become even more compelling to our customers.”
