Thu

Aug 16
2007

Brady Forrest

Brady Forrest

Stamen Releases Oakland Crimespotting

oakland crimespotting

Stamen Design has created Oakland Crimespotting, a map interface to explore crimes in Oakland, CA. They have freed data from CrimeWatch and presented it on Virtual Earth tiles in a much more useable format.

On the homepage you are presented with a map of Oakland covered in crime markers. Each type of crime is assigned a color-coded icon with an abbreviation. You can highlight all of a crime type's markers with a mouseover. You can also change the number of days for which crimes are shown. Each crime has a detail page and that crime can then be viewed in context with others. You can also slice the data by day, type and the intersection of the two. You can also subscribe to get email alerts and RSS feeds for a specific place in Oakland.

oakland map

This is the second foray for Modest Maps, Stamen's open source Flash and Python-based mapping framework. The first, Trulia's Hindsight, was launched at Where 2.0. Just like Crimespotting, Hindsight provides you with a time-phased view of public data -- in Hindsight's case it's nation-wide housing records (Radar post).

The maps come from Microsoft's Virtual Earth. Michal Migurski has published several entries (backend, getting the data, using Modest Maps) on the technical details of the project.

Stamen built this project for several reasons. One was to give Modest Maps another showcase application. Another was to free public data and make it more usable. As they say on the homepage of the site:

We’ve found ourselves frustrated by the proprietary systems and long disclaimers that ultimately limit information available to the public. As citizens we have a right to public information. A clear understanding of our environment is essential to an informed citizenry.
...
We believe that civic data should be exposed to the public in a more open way. With these maps, we hope to inspire local governments to use this data visualization model for the public release of many different kinds of data: tree plantings, new schools, applications for liquor licenses, and any other information that matters to people who live in neighborhoods.

I agree with them. It's amazingly frustrating that data procured with public funds is not more readily available. It is hidden behind archaic TOS, proprietary formats, and poorly designed sites. It's a problem all over the world. Start-ups like Swivel (Disclosure: Jesse is an adviser to Swivel) and FortiusOne (producers of GeoCommons) are built around making public data more accessible, but sometimes it's good to see people take it into their own hands.


tags: emerging tech, geo, open source, web 2.0  | comments: 5   | Sphere It
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Comments: 5

  James Schwahn [08.16.07 07:40 AM]

Thats pretty cool, but in Oakland that map will fill up pretty quick.

  Ajeet Khurana [08.16.07 08:09 AM]

Accessing public information, hmmmm! I wonder whether we will have to enter the password in "triplicate."

Unfriendly access has been the crowning hallmark of public data. Anything that is being done to change that is welcome.

Visual representation of crime data is only a small beginning. I hope to see many more such initiatives.

  Robbie Wright [08.16.07 10:19 AM]

The city of Portland, OR does something very similar here.

  MJ [08.23.07 01:48 AM]

i prefer this approach. less pretty, but more straight-forward information: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/crime/homicidemap/

  Anonymous [08.24.07 11:32 PM]

Minor clarification: ModestMaps is an open-source library, to which some members of Stamen contribute code, however, it is not a product produced by Stamen.

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