LA Times Adds a Geospatial View to its Collection of Homicide Data

The Los Angeles Times this year has been using a blog to track all of the homicides in Los Angles County this year. The Homicide Report has a simple mission:

The report seeks to reverse an age-old paradox of big-city crime reporting, which dictates that only the most unusual and statistically marginal homicide cases receive press coverage, while those cases at the very eye of the storm -- those which best expose the true statistical dimensions of the problem of deadly violence -- remain hidden. (From an early "what is" post)

This week, an interactive map and database interface has been added, apparently coded by a professor at USC. It includes a filtering function, search, listings, and a geospatial display created using Google Maps.

It's not clear based on my brief poking around the site, what the back-end consists of, though it appears to be some form of simple server-side database query that exports XML or GeoRSS. The user interface allows "export" to GeoRSS or KML; the URLs that are returned are formated "getSavedQueryResults" commands.

The new web map interface strikes a nice balance between simple information presentation and a robust data query interface.