More Map Mashing Goodness: Chicago Crime

I bet you could, at this point, write an entire book on mashing up resources. It could cover all these new funky cross-resource applications and perhaps even give some ideas for how to most effectively put together the Yahoo and Google API --

But I digress; I am too busy being impressed by Chicago Crime, available at http://www.chicagocrime.org/ . Thanks to Rafe for tipping me off about this one. ChicagoCrime blends a database of crimes reported in Chicago with Google Maps to make something gorgeous. And it has RSS feeds!

You can browse by crime type, beat, date, district location, or city map. I chose to browse by street and chose North Shore Avenue. I got a list of blocks for the street and the number of crimes for each block. Click on a block and you'll get a list of crimes reported here, listed newest to oldest (RSS feed is available for this.) There's also the option to see all crimes within an x block radius of your chosen block, and a list of nearby streets/blocks.

There is some additional detail for each crime. Click on the name of the crime and you'l get the crime type, case number, location, address, date and time, police district and beat, whether or not there were arrests, and whether or not it was a domestic situation.

I am really impressed. This is a huge amount of information nicely sliced and made browsable in several different (useful) ways. Well done. Who knew Google Maps would spawn so much Internet creativity?

Posted to US-Illinois | TrackBack