Yesterday evening I came across this post linking to a new Oakland Crimespotting Map, a mashup of public crime information with Microsoft visual earth data. It’s a compelling presentation of important data, presenting structured data in a way that is relevant to our everyday lives.
Combine this sort of data with fixmystreet (a mysociety.org project) or another similar application with an element of active civic participation, and you can start to visualize how the internet will continue to transform the way we interact with our environment–in increasingly relevant and localized ways.
For more background, see this OReilly radar post.
Update: Also see the Washington Post’s mapping crime page, which is doing a similarly great job, available here.
Make a Suggestion
1 response so far ↓
Michal Migurski // Aug 18, 2007 at 11:17 am
Thanks for the kind words, John! I appreciate what you guys are doing at the federal level, and it seems that there are analogous open data efforts going on up & down the government chain.
Leave a Comment