Joho the Blog
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August 09, 2005
Incidentlog.com has added Boston to its coverage, once a week mapping police reports of crime onto Google Maps. It's easy to imagine this system being then integrated with more information about the crimes, presenting aggregated data in order to spot trends, etc. While it's always good to see this type of integration, I had trouble with the UI: I couldn't get it to show any Boston incidents except what seem to be all of this year's fatalities even though there's a pulldown that lists about a dozen crime categories. Maybe I'm not doing it right. [Tags: gis boston] Posted
by D. Weinberger at August 9, 2005 08:06 AM
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Comments
IncidentLog.com is doing an amazing job of open-source geodata integration, with an emphasis on pulling together free dispatch feeds. Shows you what a little Perl and the new GMaps API can do. Consider the UI a prototype ... not a product of user experience gurus and focus groups. Maybe your feedback, plus the hits they get from your link, will spur them to pump the front end.
If you look carefully you'll see the browse options are disjunctive: Last 50 Events by City OR by Type. AND would be nice, and not hard to add (assuming a decent data model). Color-coding the icons by event type is also possible, as I show in this map, by grade, of my son's school community:
http://www.respectsystems.com/maps/pp_scrnshot.jpg
[250 kB jpg]
Posted by: Gordon Benett | August 9, 2005 11:04 AM
All good points. I didn't mean to sound ungrateful.
Posted by: David Weinberger | August 9, 2005 11:07 AM
They're pulling their data from the Boston PD's press releases, which, as you might expect, are only about major crimes. What would be cool would be if the BPD provided a far more detailed log, as its counterpart in Chicago does. http://12.17.79.6/
Posted by: adamg | August 10, 2005 09:52 AM