Zipskinny.com … enter a (US) zip code, get census data, and other goodies. Very nice. Does anyone know how much would it cost to pay statscanada for a license to do something similar in Canada?
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The World Freedom Atlas is:
an online geo-visualization tool that shows a number of freedom indicators so to speak. For example, you can map by a number of indexes such as raw political rights score, civil liberties, political imprisonment, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, or torture. If I’ve counted correctly the data comes from 42 datasets divided into three categories:
[from the wonderfully-named blog, flowingdata.com]
This is a bit off-topic, but spiritually related to the mission of datalibre.ca … MoveMyData.org. From the “about”:
Your content and data should be yours to manage and do with as you please. Your images, writing, tags, profile, blog entries, comments, testimonials, video, and music should be yours to download and move anyplace you want.
We will help ensure that no website ever holds your data hostage.
[link…]
I have not played with it yet, but I love the idea.
More interesting stuff from Jon Udell, this time taking some climate data for his area, using the ManyEyes platform and trying to see what has been happening in New Hampshire in the last century.
The experiment is non-conclusive, but there is an excellent debate in the comment threads, about the problems with amateurs getting their hands on the data – and the hash they can make of things because they are not experts.
Says one commenter (Brendan Lane Larson, Meteorologist, Weather Informaticist and Member of the American Meteorological Society)
Your vague “we†combined with the demonstration of the Many Eyes site trivializes the process of evidence exploration and collaborative interpretation (community of practice? peer review?) with an American 1960s hippy-like grandiose dream of democratization of visualized data that doesn’t need to be democratized in the first place. Did you read the web page at the URI that Bob Drake posted in comments herein? Do you really think that a collective vague “we†is going to take the time to read and understand (or have enough background to understand) the processes presented on that page such as “homogenization algorithms†and what these algorithms mean generally and specifically?
To which Udell replies:
I really do think that the gap between what science does and what the media says (and what most people understand) about what science does can be significantly narrowed by making the data behind the science, and the interpretation of that data, and the conversations about the interpretations, a lot more accessible.
To turn the question around, do you think we can, as a democratic society, make the kinds of policy decisions we need to make — on a range of issues — without narrowing that gap?
There is much to be said about this … but Larson’s comment “Do you really think that a collective vague “we†is going to take the time to read and understand (or have enough background to understand) the … XYZ…” is the same question that has been asked countless times, about all sorts of open approaches (from making software, to encyclopaedia, to news commentary). And the answer in general is “yes.” That is, not every member of the vague “we” will take the time, but very often with issues of enough importance, many of the members of the vague “we” can and do take the time to understand, and might just do a better job of demonstrating, interpreting or contextualizing data in ways that other members of the vague “we” can connect with and understand.
The other side of the coin of course, is that along with the good amateur stuff there is always much dross – data folk are legitimately worried about an uneducated public getting their hands on data and making all sorts of errors with it – which of course is not a good thing. But, I would argue, the potential gains from an open approach to data outweigh the potential problems.
UDATE: good addition to the discussion from Mike Caulfield.
Quality Repositories, is a website that comes out of a stats (?) course at University of Maryland. It aims to evaluate the usefulness and availability of various sources of public data, from US Government, non-US government, academic, and sports related (?) data sets. Evaluations are based on criteria such as: online availability, browsability, searchability, retrievable formats etc. The about text:
Data repositories provide a valuable resource for the public; however, the lack of standards in terminology, presentation, and access of this data across repositories reduces the accessibility and usability of these important data sets. This problem is complex and likely requires a community effort to identify what makes a “good” repository, both in technical and information terms. This site provides a starting point for this discussion….
This site suggests criteria for evaluating repositories and applies them to a list of statistical repositories. We’ve selected statistical data because it is one of the simplest data types to access and describe. Since our purpose is partly to encourage visualization tools, statistical data is also one of the easiest to visualize. The list is not comprehensive but should grow over time. By “repositories” we mean a site that provides access to multiple tables of data that they have collected. We did not include sites that linked to other site’s data sources.
The site was created by Rachael Bradley, Samah Ramadan and Ben Shneiderman.
(Tip to Jon Udell and http://del.icio.us/tag/publicdata)
Fixmystreet is a neat little project out of the UK, made to:
help people report, view, or discuss local problems they’ve found to their local council by simply locating them on a map. It launched in beta early February 2007.
You enter a postal code, are shown a map, click on the map, and add your comments about problems (graffiti, overflowing drains, broken lights, etc). An email is then sent to the local municipal council. As of today, 171 reports have been made in the past week, 381 problems have been fixed in the past month, and 2462 reports have been updated.
The project comes to you from MySociety, which:
builds websites which give people simple, tangible benefits in the civic and community aspects of their lives. For more info on our aims, click here.
Mix up and make pretty your data at Swivel:
Swivel’s mission is to liberate the world’s data and make it useful so new insights can be discovered and shared…
We believe data is most valuable when it’s out in the open where everyone can see it, debate it, have fun, and share new insights. Swivel is applying the power of the Web to data so that life gets better.
UPDATE: The graph below is titled: “The iPhone: did it shake up the phone market?”, and can be found here, with some added context/
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