📡 Data & IoT

OpenDataPhilly / City of Philadelphia Open Data Program

The City of Philadelphia has published data on OpenDataPhilly since a 2012 executive order, and the portal now catalogs 300+ datasets and APIs spanning the city and other regional bodies — flagship city feeds include Indego bike-share trips, 311 service requests and property assessments. But the city's own terms of use do not dedicate the data to the public domain: they state the City 'reserves all rights in the database and any data contained therein,' and that browsing or using the data 'does not constitute a transfer of, nor does the end user receive, any title or interest' in it — a materially weaker legal posture than the public-domain dedications used by comparable US portals like Boston's Analyze Boston or San Francisco's DataSF.

Live 📅 since 2012

🤖 AI-generated summary of the sources below — how this works · 🔎 Last verified 2026-08-02

📡 Data & IoT Open data Digital government

🎓 Lesson

A large, long-running catalog is not the same claim as an open license — reserving 'all rights' in the terms of use puts Philadelphia's own datasets closer to nyc-open-data's no-dedication default than to the PDDL cities.

Scale🏙️ City-wide

📖 Terms in this entry: Open data · Urban data platform (UDP) · Civic participation platform

Sources

↗ OpenDataPhilly — AboutTerms-of-use language: City reserves all rights, no transfer of title; catalog of 300+ datasets/APIs

↗ City of Philadelphia — Open Data Program2012 executive order origin, program purpose and departmental support

This overview was generated with AI from the public sources listed above 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.

Continue exploring

Compare this project

🇺🇸 Indego Bike Share · Philadelphia Indego's trip and station data flows into this same city portal, alongside 311 requests and property records. 🇺🇸 Dallas OpenData Portal · Dallas Both large US catalogs skip a blanket open license — Dallas relies on Terms of Use, Philadelphia's terms 'reserve all rights.' 🇺🇸 Analyze Boston and the 2014 Open Data Executive Order · Boston Philadelphia's own snippet names Analyze Boston as the public-domain dedication its 'reserves all rights' terms of use lacks. 🇺🇸 DataSF and San Francisco's Open Data Law · San Francisco Philadelphia's own snippet names DataSF's public-domain dedication as the legal posture its open-data terms fall short of.

Explore the wider context

🗺️ Your City's Problem Map Is Really a Map of Who Complains 📊 Open data guide 🏙️ Philadelphia city profile 📡 Data & IoT projects

📎 Cite this project

1001 Smart Cities (2026). “OpenDataPhilly / City of Philadelphia Open Data Program” — Philadelphia, United States. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/philadelphia-open-data-program/ (last verified 2026-08-02). Data: CC BY 4.0.

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

🚩 Report an error