Andy Keatts, a reporter for Voice of San Diego, had been working for months with the City’s Development Services Department to release hundreds of thousands of development permit records, but working with XML data was beyond a reporter’s typical skill set. Civic Knowledge extracted the records from the City’s API and converted the XML records to CSV files. After extracting the data, a Civic Knowledge analyst worked closely with Andy to explore the dataset and find the story, resulting in a series of five stories.
( Photo: Analysis by Damon Crocket. )