Socrata was acquired by Tyler Technologies in 2018 and is now the Data and Insights division of Tyler. The platform is still powered by the same software formerly known as Socrata but you will see references to Data & Insights going forward.

extent(...)

extent(...)

Returns a bounding box that encloses a set of geometries

Works with the following datatypes:

This function works with 2.1 endpoint(s). What does this mean? »

The extent(...) generates a rectangle that completely encompass a set of points or geometries, to get the rectangle that surrounds all of the crimes in Chicago in 2014:

https://data.cityofchicago.org/resource/6zsd-86xi.geojson?$select=count(*),extent(location)&year=2014

This can be very useful in generating heat maps or to describe the geographic area affected by a given dataset.