NORFOLK, VA – As City Assessor William “Pete” Rodda puts it, most requests for information from his office are because “people are interested in who owns what, where is it and what is it worth?”
That information has been available on individual parcels through the city’s Norfolk Air platform. Now that information is readily available as a dataset – information on nearly every property in Norfolk – through the city’s open data portal, NorfolkOpenData.
“We’ve identified the most common requests for city assessor’s data and we’re placing that data on the Open Data Portal free of charge,” Rodda said.
The assessor’s office receives about 20 requests each month for the types of information now easily available at
data.norfolk.gov. The 31 data fields include each parcel’s owner, street number, Geographic Parcel Identification Number, acreage, property use, residential finished living area and most recent sale price.
Posting the data on the portal offers efficiency to Rodda’s staff and reflects his pledge to be “committed to the assessor’s office being more open.”
Norfolk launched its portal in March with four data sets and its own commitment to provide data that’s useful to everyone. The city has added 16 datasets since then, including information on public safety, neighborhoods, code enforcement, parking, and Recreation, Parks and Open Space. As the city’s data offerings have grown, so have the number of visitors to the portal – a 181 percent increase since April. Please join the data party!
The City of Norfolk will continue to add datasets in 2019 to enhance residents’ ability to find information about the work of the city, to support coordination and efficiency among City departments, and with the hope that these data will serve as a catalyst for innovation by businesses and education institutions.
Each of the data sets can be sorted, filtered and customized – create and save your own searches to keep tabs on your neighborhood. Residents may also view data with charts, graphs and maps. Need help? View one of the easy to use tutorials on the NorfolkOpenData portal.
As always, feel free to view, download and manipulate this data. We provide this data as an affirmation of our commitment to transparency and community collaboration. We hope that you will use this data to improve your community, spark a business idea or just satisfy your curiosity. Data will be updated and expanded often as we work to build a comprehensive open data portal.
For more information on OpenDataNorfolk, call 664-4007 or email
opendata@norfolk.gov.