On side products of openness

Open data is amazing because, like the pig, nothing has to be thrown away. In addition to that, you have an interesting twist of the “idea vs apple” metaphore. Specifically, data thought and usable for one specific usage can be used for something completely different.

This is the case of the NYC buildings dataset, here its page on our index. It contains the shapes of the buildings currently present in New York, but with a fascinating twist: it contains the year in which a given building was built. This is obviously an amazing element for us, because this means we are able to go back in time to buildings built in the 17th century and still visible today (not many) and that enables us to better georeference old maps of the area to be digitized.

For example, this is the Lincoln Center area now, based on the dataset, and this is the same area in 1911. We can notice many of the residential buildings area exactly the same, being pre-century. Yet, many areas are completely new. Not to mention the amazing work done on Central Park, which is possibly one of the most amazing man-made recreational areas in the world, considering it was crated in 1857.

As always, open data shows its amazingness and its reusability. Obviously, not all data is perfect, some elements do not have a building-date, so they will have to be reconciled some other way. But we are talking about a really small set of buildings and some of them quite famous. The MET, for instance, has no dating on the dataset, yet we know from its history that it was established in 1870, so as soon as the reconciliation tool will be up and running, we will have the possibility to fix these datasets and to see the city in an even better historical context.