#new data sets

Tom Schenk, the director of analytics for Chicago's Department of Innovation and Technology, gave an enthusiastic greeting to the standing-room only crowd.

After welcoming the crowd, whose backgrounds ranged from programmers, urban planners and data analysts to physicists, engineers and astronomers.... yes astronomers.

After Ghani spoke, Schenk welcomed the crowd, declaring Chicago as the "best open government community in the world!"

He then attempted to make historic data of traffic interesting to the crowd.

"So there's a traffic tracker application, which shows you the density of traffic, congestion of traffic throughout the city of Chicago based on the buses we have." (See: Using a Chicago bus as a data tool.)

"Every single bus you see out there, actually every single city asset you see ranging from buses to snowplows to my cellphone has a GPS tracker on it. So we can track all the city assets," said Schenk.

Schenk explained how traffic tracker, created by the city utilizes the GPS traces to give a real-time picture of traffic in the city, but said the raw data that powers it was only recently released in December of 2012.

The data set refreshes every 10 minutes, providing estimated speeds per street segments.

The data sets themselves have potential for developers and urban planners wanting to analyze traffic patterns in the city to get a fresh, raw look at how vehicles move on Chicago's arterial streets.

For urban planners in transportation, this is a potential gold mine, if they manage to unlock patterns.

Schenk said the city went out of their way to work with data portal vendor, Socrata, to ensure the API would not have performance issues if developers wanted to create applications around it.

Check it out for yourself:

Chicago Traffic Tracker - Historical Congestion Estimates by Region | API Information

Chicago Traffic Tracker - Historical Congestion Estimates by Segment | API information