Portland Urban Data Lake (PUDL)

Leads

Bureau of Planning and Sustainability (BPS), Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT), Bureau of Technology Services (BTS), Portland State University (PSU), TriMet, Metro, Portland General Electric (PGE)

Sponsors

Mayor Ted Wheeler, Commissioner Chloe Eudaly

The City of Portland does not have good, centralized systems in place for managing, integrating and analyzing the data we have today, much less the large volumes of data coming from Smart Cities technologies like sensors, connected vehicle infrastructure, and private-sector services. The City needs to derive insight from data we have now, and the data we will be collecting in the future. This will help City leadership and City staff to make and evaluate decisions, design and evaluate policies and programs, enhance community engagement, and allow us to better partner with the private sector, researchers, and non-profits to meet City goals around livability, affordability, safety, sustainability, resiliency and equity.

The Portland Urban Data Lake (PUDL) pilot will collect, store, integrate, and analyze data from a variety of sources — including the Traffic Safety Sensor Pilot — to provide a foundation for data-driven decision making for the City of Portland, helping to harness the power of the City’s data.

Data does not stop at the City of Portland border. The City has partnered with PSU, TriMet, Metro, Portland General Electric, Hack Oregon and others to develop PUDL as a regional resource. We also recognize that this type of cloud-based data platform is new to the public sector, and there are many systems and tools to choose from. The plan is to start small, experiment and learn, and to recognize from the start that not everything will be successful.

Goals

  1. Collect and store data from a variety of sources, including new sensor deployments, PBOT and BPS data sources as well as other regional data sources, while respecting privacy and security needs.

  2. Develop analytics that create new insight from these data sources, and to demonstrate the effective use of Smart Cities data.

  3. Explore technologies and architectures for providing standardized, documented access to data for public sector agencies and local innovators.