🏙️ Chicago Open Data Portal Scraper

🚀 Export any City of Chicago dataset in seconds. Browse the catalog of 600+ public datasets or pull rows from food inspections, crimes, 311 requests, permits, business licenses, salaries, and more. Filter with native SoQL.

The Chicago Open Data Portal Scraper taps data.cityofchicago.org, the official Socrata-powered open-data hub of the City of Chicago. The Actor returns 13 structured fields per record, including the resource ID, dataset name, description, category, creation and update timestamps, row and column counts, the row payload itself, the dataset URL, and a collection timestamp.

The catalog covers more than 600 public datasets across food inspections, crimes 2001-present, 311 service requests, building permits, business licenses, employee salaries, transit ridership, traffic crashes, parks, COVID indicators, budget appropriations, and dozens of other domains. This Actor wraps Socrata's SoQL query language so you can filter, sort, search, and project columns without touching the API directly.

🎯 Target Audience	💡 Primary Use Cases
Urban planners, journalists, civic-tech developers, researchers, transparency advocates, local-government analysts, public-health teams	Crime trend analysis, restaurant inspection dashboards, 311 monitoring, permit-issuance studies, business-license intelligence, salary transparency, civic-tech apps

📋 What the Chicago Open Data Portal Scraper does

Two modes in a single Actor:

• 📚 Catalog mode. Browse the full City of Chicago dataset catalog with names, descriptions, categories, and metadata.
• 📊 Dataset mode. Pull rows from any dataset by its 4x4 resource ID (e.g. 22u3-xenr Building Violations, ijzp-q8t2 Crimes 2001-Present).
• 🧮 Column filters. Pass {"violation_status": "OPEN"} for simple equality filters.
• 🔎 SoQL WHERE clause. Native SoQL expression for advanced filtering (violation_date > '2024-01-01' AND ward = '42').
• 🔤 Full-text search. Apply a $q query across all columns.
• 🎯 Field selection. Return only the columns you need with selectFields.
• 📐 Ordering. Sort by any column (violation_date DESC).

Each record bundles either the catalog metadata or one row of the chosen dataset, alongside the resource ID, dataset URL, and a collection timestamp.

💡 Why it matters: Chicago has been one of the most ambitious municipal open-data programs in the U.S. since 2010. Hand-coding a Socrata client means dealing with pagination, polling, SoQL quirks, and per-dataset schemas. This Actor delivers consistent records you can pipe straight into BI tools, notebooks, or civic-tech apps.

📊 Data fields

Each record includes: category, columnsCount, createdAt, data, description, name, recordType, resourceId, rowsCount, scrapedAt, updatedAt, url. These field names come straight from the actor's dataset schema, so what you see here is what lands in your dataset.

🚀 How to use

1. 📝 Sign up. Create a free account with $5 credit (takes 2 minutes).
2. 🌐 Open the Actor. Go to the Chicago Open Data Portal Scraper page on the Apify Store.
3. 🎯 Set input. Run catalog mode to discover datasets, then dataset mode with a resourceId.
4. 🚀 Run it. Click Start and let the Actor collect your data.
5. 📥 Download. Grab your results in the Dataset tab as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML.

⏱️ Total time from signup to downloaded dataset: 3-5 minutes. No coding required.

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• 🗺️ Nominatim OSM Scraper - Geocode Chicago addresses via OpenStreetMap
• 🌐 World Bank Open Data Scraper - Cross-country indicators
• 🌦️ NOAA Weather Scraper - U.S. weather observations and forecasts

💡 Pro Tip: browse the complete ParseForge collection for more reference-data scrapers.

⚠️ Disclaimer: this Actor is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the City of Chicago, Socrata, Tyler Technologies, or any government body. All trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. Only publicly available open data is collected.

🆘 Need Help?

If you hit a bug, have questions about setup, or need a scraper we haven't built yet, open our contact form or write to parseforge@protonmail.com. We also take on paid custom data projects.

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