An Example of Dynamic Map/Data Visualization

The Flowing Data blog posted a nifty time-series map of the spread of the Walmart franchise: Watching the Growth of Walmart Across America. (Via Planetizen)

This map visualization of change over time draws on data from Freebase (an open source database of databases, I think) and uses the flash-based map-tile tool Modest Maps.

Is it GIS? It is certainly a good example of using map data to make a simple point.

And, if we're being honest with ourselves, it's fun to watch the little green lights flashing across the map.

Another Map-Based News Aggregator

The Online Journalism Review has an interview this week with "noted journalist/programmer/Web guru Adrian Holovaty" about his new project EveryBlock, which filters local news by neighborhood and presents it in several formats, including a simple map view.

Mr. Holovaty was behind the recently ended chicagocrime.org which looked at one data stream for one city. He describes EveryBlock as an attempt to provide a full news feed for each individual block in three major cities: New York, Chicago and San Francisco.

While the graphic map-presentation aspects of this site are interesting -- Holavaty and his team created their own version of a base map, for example, instead of using Google or Yahoo -- what may be more interesting is their work on finding new sources of interesting information and new ways to extract location information where it is not already embedded.

"...we're detecting geography in narratives -- "blobs," so to speak -- and making it easy for people to find relevant news articles and government documents that refer to specific places near them."

It is also interesting to note that the project is funded under a grant from the Knight News Challenge that requires the source code to be released under an open-source license at the end of the 2-year grant period.

GIS 2.0?

What should we call it when we are seeing crowd-sourcing and Creative Commons licensing in geospatial data distribution?

Case in point: the folks at Zillow have released shapefile versions of the neighborhood boundaries that they use in their geo-enabled online real estate service. Why? They say it is "to allow people to use and contribute to our growing database." In fact, they explicitly invite users to add to the collection and post those additions for eventual integration into Zillow's on-line offerings.

Zillow's Drew Myers made the announcement on the Zillow Blog. He noted the large challenge of creating boundaries for more than 7,000 neighborhoods, but made clear that Zillow hopes to gain even more knowledge from this release.

So, after all this work, why are we giving this data away for free? Here at Zillow, we’re all about transparency — we think a freely available and totally transparent nationwide data-set of neighborhoods will result in some great innovation that we’re excited to check out. Real estate is local — and neighborhoods are a great way to look at real estate on a local level. We’re particularly excited to see what companies and individual techies can come up with, who may not have the budget to license this data from other data providers.

The data are made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license, meaning that users are free to use and share the data, as long as Zillow is credited. And users are free to "remix" the data, provided that they publish it using the same or a compatible license.

Before you get too excited, be aware that the data is limited to major cities and is not available for all states. (why is no city in Delaware sufficiently important?!?) The data for Washington DC, for example, does not extend to the suburban neighborhoods outside of the District lines.

But that's why Zillow has made this release. They want to see this data extend and they are setting it free (with appropriate metadata, I see) to see how it grows.

(Via James Fee GIS Blog)

Another Media Map in (and on) The News

Governing.com's 13th Floor blog features a simple geospatial mash-up from the Wichita Eagle this week.

The Eagle's Wichita Crime Maps is similar to other media mash-ups that we've seen. It presents basic crime data from the local police on a "standard" Google Maps map. There's nothing too earth-shattering here.

But the 13th Floor bloggers do use this to make a point about data-sharing from their point of view as folks who cover local government issues:

Lots of police departments are mapping crime data and lots are putting the maps online. Usually, though, they end up buried deep within government Web sites. I'd guess that most are rarely visited. So, if governments really want the public to see their data (and, in some cases, that might be a pretty big "if"), working with the media on projects like this one makes a lot of sense.