Grace Simrall has been the chief of civic innovation in Louisville, Ky., for less than a year, but she's already making headlines. In her quest to make open data more accessible to constituents, Simrall has established the first city channel on the If This Then That, or IFTTT, platform, a web service that links services and devices together.

By connecting data sets to IFTTT -- that's "ift" as in "shift" -- Simrall is making sure that Louisville residents don't have to deal with APIs or dig through flat files on the city's open data portal. Instead, they can subscribe for no charge to a set of prebuilt applets, or mini-applications, on the IFTT platform.

"I view this as part of a broader strategy that we have when it comes to Louisville's take on smart cities," she said.

Grace Simrall Grace Simrall

Simrall, who founded the boutique analytics firm iGlass Analytics before taking a role in the public sector, launched the project in February, starting with the city's real-time air-quality data set. Residents of Louisville, a city that's often ranked as one of the most polluted in the United States, can now subscribe to 15 air-quality applets. They can, for example, automatically receive an SMS notification when the air quality changes or have the data automatically recorded to a Google spreadsheet.

Several of the applets are targeted at smart home technology, one of the draws to the platform, according to Simrall. Applets can trigger an air filtration system to turn on or the color of a Philips Hue lightbulb to change color when the air quality changes.

"The prebuilt applets make it easy to democratize open data," Simrall said. "Now, a person who is not technical, all they have to do is be able to install an app, which most people can do, and subscribe to an applet."