San Francisco publishes a vast amount about itself — who's paid what, who owns what, what's being built, and what's gone wrong. This guide maps what "San Francisco open data" is, the datasets that matter most, how to access them, who relies on them — and, honestly, where ALKARTIS does and doesn't operate today.
Open data is public information a government publishes proactively, in reusable formats, for anyone to access without a formal request. In San Francisco, most of it flows through DataSF (data.sfgov.org) — the city's central catalog, with downloads and an API for each dataset. People search for it as "San Francisco open data," "open data San Francisco," or "opendata san francisco" — it's all the same thing.
San Francisco's open data law (Administrative Code Chapter 22D) makes open-by-default the city's policy and created a Chief Data Officer to steward the program.
Thousands of datasets exist, but a handful carry most of the questions people actually ask:
Resident-filed service requests across the combined city and county — one of DataSF's most-used datasets.
Assessor-Recorder property assessments and recorded sales for the city-county of San Francisco.
Department of Building Inspection permit filings — construction activity across the city.
Rent Board eviction notices — a core dataset for housing, tenant, and displacement research.
Salary and benefits by department and job classification, from the Controller's office.
Registered business locations from the Treasurer & Tax Collector, plus restaurant inspection results.
There are three common routes in. You can browse and download any dataset from the portal as a CSV, JSON, or GeoJSON file. You can query datasets programmatically — the portal exposes an API for each one, so developers and researchers can filter and pull specific records or geographies without downloading whole files. And for authoritative single-record lookups, individual agency systems give you the official record for one address or entity.
Each route trades convenience for effort. Browsing is easy but returns a raw table with no context; the API is powerful but assumes you can write queries and reconcile fields across agencies that rarely share a common identifier.
The hard part of open data isn't access — it's that a dataset is not an answer. A payroll file gives you a number, not whether it's unusual for the role. A permit gives you an address, not whether it's one of dozens on the same block this quarter. A violation names a building, not whether the same owner has a pattern of them across a portfolio held under different LLCs.
Turning records into answers takes 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 its source so it can be checked. That connective layer is what we call Information Intelligence — the engine behind every ALKARTIS product.
ALKARTIS is live in Philadelphia, not yet in San Francisco. Our products are built specifically around Philadelphia's public records today; San Francisco is on our aspirational roadmap rather than committed to a timeline. If your organization needs connected San Francisco intelligence — landlord portfolios, payroll patterns, permit signals, block-level activity — our enterprise and custom analysis engagements are how a new city comes online. Tell us what you need and we'll scope it.
DataSF is San Francisco's open data portal, where city agencies publish public datasets — 311 requests, permits, property records, payroll, crime, and more — free for anyone to access, download, and reuse.
Yes — free to browse, download, and use, with an API for most datasets. The challenge isn't access; it's cleaning, cross-referencing, and interpreting raw exports across agencies that don't share common identifiers.
Browse and download datasets from the portal as CSV, JSON, or GeoJSON; query them through the portal's API; or use individual agency systems for the authoritative record on a single address or entity.
Not yet. ALKARTIS products are built around Philadelphia's public records today, and San Francisco is on our aspirational roadmap rather than committed to a timeline. For organizations that need connected San Francisco intelligence, our enterprise and custom analysis engagements are how a new city comes online — you can request San Francisco directly.