Building off a mandate to open its record of payments, the Richmond, Virginia city government launched a new open data portal containing a variety of municipal information last week.
In addition to cataloging all government checks that are cut for everything from water treatment chemicals to D cell batteries, the portal centralizes data like real estate assessments, property transfers, school district boundaries and motor vehicle accidents that appears across many websites.
Data are organized under seven categories within the Socrata-built website. The portal includes tabular and GIS datasets as well as interactive maps.

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