Mission Statement

Philly Open Health increases access to and availability of public health data for Philadelphia and surrounding counties. There is a huge amount of publicly-available population health data available for the greater Philadelphia area, but it isn't technically "open data". While some of the data on Philly Open Health will be open (machine-readable) data, such as population demographics, other data will be sourced from PDFs, siloed databases, and filtered federal data sets. The combination of data sources and types will provide a more comprehensive look at population health in the greater Philly area, even though open data in the public health arena is limited.

The jumping-off point for Philly Open Health is the [Office of HIV Planning (OHP)] (http://www.hivphilly.org/)'s annual epidemiologic profile (or "epi" profile), which covers Philadelphia and eight surrounding counties in two states. This document includes over 200 tables and 100 figures on everything from race/ethnicity to drug use to poverty to HIV/AIDS. This document has always been designed for print, which means that limited data are included for presentation. OHP would like to provide the public with the data used in developing the epi profile in one centralized location.

Getting Started with Development!

Please take a look at the requirements_notes.md in this directory for an overview of our 1.0-release feature goals.

Minimum Viable Product:

• Documents have:
  • Title
  • Description
  • Date Collected
  • Date Published
  • Tags
    • Basic level of suggestion to prevent tag explosion
  • Source (who did this - can be just a text field MVP)
  • 1 or more files
• Files can be uploaded only by users
• Users can only be created by an existing admin user

You can view the first batch of files on Dropbox here. Metadata for these files is being compiled in a Google Sheet here.

We're also doing some lightweight project management over at Trello to keep track of what tasks are underway and who's working on them.

Actually running the code!

Start by copying the config/database.example.yml file over to config/database.yml.

Next, if you're on a Mac, make sure you have a Postgres server running locally (dowloading the app is probably your best bet).

Then create a user. In the terminal type:

rake db:migrate

rails c
u = User.new(email: "yourname@abc.com")
u.password = "yourpassword"
u.password_confirmation = "yourpassword"
u.save

Then seed the database, and start the server:

rake db:seed
rails s

The output will tell you where to point your browser. Usually this is "http://localhost:3000/"

If you get the following error

ActiveRecord::NoDatabaseError: FATAL:  database "philly-open-health_development" does not exist

Make sure to create the database first. Run

bin/rake db:create db:migrate

to create the database.

Annotating models

To annotate the models, run

bundle exec annotate --exclude tests,fixtures,factories,serializers

Running tests

To run tests with Spring preloading, use bin/rspec.