Open Data Release Privacy Review

In government and the public sector, open data programs publish records such as service requests, permits and code enforcement cases so residents can see how their city works. This concept illustrates a release gate in SemanticFed that sits between departmental data and the public catalog: before a dataset is published, every column is checked for personal data and every protective rule waits for a named person's approval.

Public records are full of details that should never reach an open portal. A service request can carry the reporter's name and phone number, a street address that identifies a home, a photo link and free-text notes that say far more than intended. The data is also spread across departments and older systems, so a release is often assembled by hand from exports and a missed column is found only after publication. The design envisions querying the departmental sources in place through one semantic model and makes the privacy review a required step.

The illustrated page sits under Policies, headed Open Data Releases and described as datasets waiting for privacy review before publication, with tabs for pending, approved and published releases. Each dataset row shows its sources, the number of sensitive columns, the destination and a status such as awaiting review, blocked or approved. The expanded sample, a year of 311 service requests drawn from GovCitizenHub and AssetHandler, lists each flagged column with what it was detected as and the rule proposed: deny the reporter's name, phone number, photo link and notes, generalize the incident address to its block, and allow the category, status and dates. Every proposed rule shows as inactive, with Approve & publish and Reject beneath, and an output preview shows sample rows with locations reduced to a block. Another sample row, code enforcement cases drawn from a legacy case database, is blocked with no destination.

A Guardrails panel states that proposals are created inactive, that a release needs a named approver and that every release is logged, and a next-step card points to a FluidGrids service response data sink. The design intent is that GovCitizenHub and AssetHandler remain the systems of record for requests, permits and assets, and SemanticFed governs what may leave them. An approved release is designed to pass to FluidGrids, which is designed to publish it to the GovCitizenHub open data catalog as a new version and push it into a BigConsole data sink behind the city's transparency console.