Philadelphia publishes an extraordinary amount about itself — who's paid what, who owns what, what's being built, and what's gone wrong. This guide maps what "Philadelphia open data" actually is, the datasets that matter most, how to get at them, who relies on them, and how ALKARTIS turns raw records into answers you can act on.
Open data is public information a government publishes proactively, in reusable formats, for anyone to access without a formal request. In Philadelphia, most of it lives in OpenDataPhilly — the city's open data catalog, which indexes hundreds of datasets from city departments and regional partners in one place. The program grew out of the city's open data policy, established by a 2012 mayoral executive order that directed departments to make their data open by default.
The result is one of the richer municipal open data ecosystems in the country: salaries, property assessments, building permits, code violations, business licenses, 311 service requests, crime incidents, and much more, all published on a recurring basis. It's genuinely free, and for most categories you don't need to file a Pennsylvania Right-to-Know request to see it — it's already posted. (For the records that do still require a formal request, see our Philadelphia Public Records Guide.)
Hundreds of datasets exist, but a handful carry most of the civic questions people actually ask. These are the categories worth knowing:
Every city employee's title, department, and pay — a foundational transparency dataset for anyone tracking how public money is spent.
The Office of Property Assessment's valuation of every parcel, plus recent real estate transfers — the backbone of any property or tax question.
Licenses & Inspections (L&I) building permits, business licenses, and code violations — active and historical, the pulse of the built environment.
Resident-filed reports — potholes, illegal dumping, graffiti, and more — a block-level signal of what's happening on the ground.
Rental licensing status and public eviction filings — essential for tenant advocacy, housing research, and landlord due diligence.
Police incident data and related public safety datasets, published for neighborhood-level analysis and accountability.
There are three common ways in, depending on how technical you want to get. The first is simply browsing and downloading: OpenDataPhilly lets you search the catalog and pull a dataset as a CSV, GeoJSON, or shapefile. The second is programmatic access — many of the city's datasets are hosted on platforms that expose a SQL-style API, so developers and researchers can query specific records or geographies directly instead of downloading an entire file. The third is the individual department systems — the OPA property search, L&I's permit and violation lookups, and others — which are useful when you need the authoritative record for a single address rather than the bulk dataset.
Each route trades convenience against effort. Browsing is easy but gives you a raw table with no context. The API is powerful but assumes you can write queries and reconcile fields across datasets that don't share a common identifier. For a practical, step-by-step walkthrough of the do-it-yourself path, see Open Data 101: How to Actually Find and Use Philadelphia's Public Records.
Here's the gap almost everyone hits: a dataset is not an answer. A payroll export gives you a title and a number — not whether that number is unusual for the role or growing faster than peers. A permit filing gives you an address and a project type — not whether it's one of a hundred similar filings on the same block this quarter. A single assessment gives you the city's valuation — not whether three near-identical homes on the block were assessed twenty percent apart, which is the fact that decides whether an appeal is worth filing.
Closing that gap takes three things open data alone doesn't provide: cross-referencing datasets that were never designed to be joined, establishing a baseline so a single number has context, and tracing every figure back to the specific record it came from so the answer can be checked. That connective layer is what we call Information Intelligence — and it's the reason ALKARTIS exists.
Open data isn't only for developers. The people getting the most out of it fall into a few groups:
Every ALKARTIS product starts from a real question and works backward to the open records that answer it — showing the specific source behind every figure so it can be checked.
Whether a city salary or raise is unusual for the role — built on public payroll data. Learn more →
Flags likely property over-assessments and drafts a BRT-ready appeal — built on OPA data. Learn more →
A landlord's full public record across every property — built on L&I, licensing, and court data. Learn more →
Every new permit, license, violation, and 311 request near an address — built on live civic feeds. Learn more →
See exactly which datasets feed which product on Data & Sources.
Public information the city publishes for anyone to access and reuse — payroll, property assessments, permits, violations, licenses, 311 requests, crime incidents, and more. Most of it is catalogued through OpenDataPhilly and released under the city's open data policy.
The City of Philadelphia's open data catalog — a single index pointing to hundreds of datasets published by city departments and regional partners. It's free to browse and download, and many datasets are also available through APIs.
Yes. Datasets published through OpenDataPhilly are freely accessible and generally reusable. The cost isn't access — it's the time to clean, cross-reference, and interpret raw exports that were never designed to be joined.
Many datasets are hosted on platforms that expose a SQL-style API alongside CSV, GeoJSON, and shapefile downloads, so you can query records directly. The exact endpoint depends on the dataset and its host.