What is the ThinkChicago Workbench?

The ThinkChicago Workbench is a cloud-based service with a set of general-purpose development and data analysis environments to help you to explore your ideas with the ThinkChicago data. All applications run as Docker containers on a system hosted by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA)  at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 

What data is available?

The ThinkChicago workbench provides access to five datasets from the City of Chicago. These datasets are also available via the City of Chicago Data Portal.

• Crimes 2001 - present

• Divvy Trips

• Divvy Bicycle Stations (historical)

• Taxi Trips
• 2FM Tech Challenge

Each of these datasets is available in the /shared directory of any running application in Workbench.

What applications are available?

• Cloud9 development environments for popular languages including Python, Java, PHP, and Node.js
• Data analysis environments including Jupyter Notebooks and RStudio
• Database and data management software including MySQL, PostgresSQL, and MongoDB

Getting getting data on/off the Workbench

• Github: We strongly encourage you to use Github (or similar service) to store all of your source code and data.  
• File Manager: The Workbench File Manager application can be used to upload/download data.

/home and /shared

Along with the /shared directory described above, your /home directory is available in every running application.  Just look under /home/<userid>.