City of Miami Open Data: A Live GIS Hub and a Stalled Portal

🤖 AI-generated summary · 🔎 Last verified 2026-07-26

This overview was generated with AI from the public sources listed below and checked against them before publication. It has not had a complete human fact-check — treat it as a starting point and follow the sources.

How this atlas is made · What “last verified” means · What “source-checked” means

Two portals, one abandoned: the Socrata site holds 12 unlicensed datasets untouched since June 2022. The working GIS hub quietly ships a CC BY 4.0 deed in its metadata, required by no ordinance.

Outcome🔄 Ongoing

Evidence🏛️ Official

what does this mean?

The strongest source is the operator's or the city's own reporting — an official report, dataset or press release. It grades who did the looking — not how well the project went. All four grades →

Run byCity of Miami — Department of Innovation and Technology, GIS team

Scale🏙️ City-wide

Part of 1001 Smart Cities — 1,167 documented projects · 🏙️ 7 more in Miami · 📊 Open data guide · 📡 Data & IoT projects

The City of Miami publishes open data through two unconnected portals. A Socrata site at data.miamigov.com holds 12 datasets, none carrying a licence and none updated since June 2022; the working catalogue is an Esri ArcGIS Hub run by the Department of Innovation and Technology's GIS team, whose most recent items carry metadata timestamps from 26 July 2026. Almost every hub dataset ships a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 deed in its metadata, where Miami-Dade County's separate county hub ships only an 'as is' accuracy disclaimer. No city ordinance or resolution requires any of it, and the city publishes no terms of use connecting the data to Florida's public records law.

Live 📅 since 2018

📊 Impact

97 published items on the GIS hub, of which 85 are feature services, nearly all carrying a CC BY 4.0 deed; the parallel Socrata portal holds 12 datasets, none licensed and none updated since June 2022.

🎓 Lesson

The policy page is the wrong thing to read. Miami legislated nothing, yet ships a cleaner licence than several cities that passed ordinances — because the deed lives in dataset metadata, where only a reader of the metadata will find it.

📡 Data & IoT Open data Digital government GIS & cadastre

Sources

↗ City of Miami Open Data GIS (ArcGIS Hub)The live catalogue. Run by the city's GIS team on Esri ArcGIS Hub, separate from the county hub at gis-mdc.opendata.arcgis.com.

↗ ArcGIS item metadata — City Boundary (licence and operator)licenseInfo: 'This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.' accessInformation: '© 2019, City of Miami, Department of Innovation and Technology, GIS Team'. Item created 2019-02-18.

↗ ArcGIS search API — all items owned by CityMiamiFLReturns total 97. Tree Permits, City of Miami 311 Service Requests Since 2015 and Building Permits Since 2014 each carry the CC BY 4.0 licenseInfo string and a modified value of 1785071035000, which is 2026-07-26.

↗ ArcGIS search API — feature services onlyReturns total 85, the count of actual data services within the 97 published items; the remainder are maps, apps and image assets.

↗ Socrata Discovery API — data.miamigov.comresultSetSize 12. The license key is absent on every dataset returned. Newest updatedAt is 2022-06-01; 'Miami FL- Revenues' shows 2018-07-16, evidencing the portal existed by mid-2018.

Show 2 more sourcesShow fewer

↗ City of Miami Data ExplorerLinks both data.miamigov.com and the ArcGIS hub. Publishes no terms of use, no licence statement, and no citation to Florida Chapter 119; the site footer asserts '© 2026 City of Miami'.

↗ ArcGIS search API — Miami-Dade County items (contrast)County datasets are owned by 'MDPublisher' and their licenseInfo reads 'Miami-Dade County provides this data for use as is. The areas depicted by this map/data are approximate, and are not accurate to surveying or engineering standards' — an accuracy disclaimer, not a licence deed.

Continue exploring

Compare this project

🇺🇸 Washington D.C.'s open data policy, ArcGIS Hub portal and licence · Washington D.C. Same lesson, opposite direction: D.C.'s terms promise CC0 and the files ship CC BY; Miami promises nothing and the files ship CC BY. 🇺🇸 Analyze Boston and the 2014 Open Data Executive Order · Boston Boston's mayoral order wrote CC BY and its files ship a public-domain deed; Miami has no order at all and the deed is CC BY. 🇺🇸 Chicago's Open Data Executive Order and Portal · Chicago Chicago's 2012 executive order carried a reporting duty and it lapsed in 2014; Miami never legislated, and the licence still ships.

Explore the wider context

🏙️ Urban digital twins compared 📖 Open data 📖 Urban data platform (UDP)📖 Building performance standard (BPS)

📎 Cite this project

1001 Smart Cities (2026). “City of Miami Open Data: A Live GIS Hub and a Stalled Portal” — Miami, United States. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/miami-open-data/ (last verified 2026-07-26). Data: CC BY 4.0.

The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.

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