ChicagoPulse: Ask Your City What’s Changing and Why

bcastelino — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 05:57:10 GMT

I built ChicagoPulse for the Databricks Community Genie-Powered App Challenge.

Track: Track A - Real-World Problem Solver

Why it fits: ChicagoPulse solves a practical civic-data problem by helping residents, analysts, and decision-makers move from a natural-language question to a data-backed answer without needing to understand datasets, schemas, or SQL.

What is ChicagoPulse?

Chicago publishes a huge amount of public data, but getting useful answers from it still often requires knowing which dataset to use, how the data is structured, and how to query it.

ChicagoPulse is a Genie-powered civic intelligence application that lets users explore Chicago’s public data using natural language.

Users can ask questions such as:

Which neighborhoods had the most 311 requests last month?
What service request categories are increasing the fastest?
Compare recent trends between Austin and Lake View.
Which community areas had high building violations but relatively few building permits?
How fresh is the underlying data?

Genie at the Core

Genie powers the main experience rather than acting as an add-on chatbot.

A user asks a question, Genie interprets it using curated semantic context, queries the appropriate data, and returns a data-backed answer. ChicagoPulse then presents that result through supporting tables, charts, comparisons, and generated SQL.

If Genie were removed, the application's primary question-driven experience would no longer work.

The Data

ChicagoPulse uses public datasets from the City of Chicago Data Portal, including:

311 Service Requests
Business Licenses
Building Permits
Building Violations
Food Inspections
Chicago Community Area data

The data is transformed into curated Delta tables and views designed around Chicago’s 77 Community Areas.

More Than a Demo

ChicagoPulse is backed by a working ingestion pipeline that pulls data from the Chicago Data Portal into Databricks on a recurring basis.

It is not running on hardcoded results or a manually uploaded demo file. As the source data changes, the pipeline continues ingesting and processing those updates.

The application also includes Data Health, which surfaces dataset freshness, coverage, and pipeline status.

Application Experience

Ask ChicagoPulse
Ask natural-language questions and receive data-backed answers powered by Genie.

Neighborhood Pulse
Explore and compare trends across Chicago Community Areas.

Data Health
See how fresh the underlying datasets are and verify the health of the ingestion pipeline.

Architecture

Chicago Data Portal → Databricks ingestion pipeline → Delta tables/views → Genie Agent → Databricks App

Built With

Databricks Genie • Databricks Apps • Unity Catalog • Delta Lake • Serverless SQL • Python • FastAPI • React • TypeScript • City of Chicago Data Portal

ChicagoPulse

Ask your city what’s changing and why.

topic ChicagoPulse: Ask Your City What’s Changing and Why in Community Articles