About the Author:  Sean Gorman founded FortiusOne in 2005 to bring location based analytics to the mass market. Sean brings over 10 years of experience at the forefront of the geospatial revolution as a researcher, practitioner, and entrepreneur at FortiusOne. Through both academic and entreprenurial efforts he has been working to make geographic data more accessible to the public since 1997 culminating in the creation of GeoCommons – a crowd-sourced repository of statistical data and social feeds that can be easily mapped, remixed and reused by non-technical users. Sean has been featured in media such as, Wired, Der Spiegel, ABC, Washington Post, Business 2.0, MSNBC, CBS and CNN. He also holds a PhD. From George Mason University in Public Policy where he was the Provost’s High Potential Scholar and was the recipient of the Fischer Prize. He has published dozens of articles on geographic data sharing and analysis, and authored the book Networks, Complexity and Security: The Role of Public Policy in Critical Infrastructure Protection. Read more from this author

Lately, we’ve been running a small project with our data team to see how fast we can produce maps relevant to breaking news. One of our hopes is that GeoCommons will provide a repository of data that you can quickly find or contribute data that provides a geographic dimension to breaking news. One of the key themes with GeoCommons is being able to tell a story with a map, and the news is a great source of stories. Whenever I click on the maps associated with breaking news I’m frustrated with the limited interactivity of the flash apps they are typically built with. Also there is never the ability to mash that data up with other data or go do something new and different with it. One of the cool themes of Web 2.0 has been citizen journalism and we’d like to expand that to citizen cartography. The Open Street Maps folks used citizen cartography to refer to street data collection, but I think it can be broadened to a bigger universe to tell a variety of stories. The best journalism is done with hard facts and we think that maps should be driven by facts as well, and to us that means using data to prove a point. Here is an example of one our first attempts at citizen cartography from a headline in todays Washington Post:

Pressure at Mortgage Firm Led to Mass Approval of Bad Loans

So where are the banks with most bad loan offenders?

Map of Percentage of Loans that Result in Home Foreclosures by Zipcode

The map above shows the percentage of home loans that were foreclosed on by banks. The map below gives a zoom in on the data with some the attributed details:

The data is dervied from FDIC quarterly reports (in this case the 4th quarter of 2006) for 8,666 FIDC insured financial institutions across the U.S. The top five financial institutions for total foreclosures (not percentage) are located in zipcode areas:

1. 89014, Henderson, NV

2. 44114, Cleveland, OH

3. 45202 Cincinnati, OH

4. 48098, Troy, MI

5. 35202 Birmingham, AL

Just one example of linking data to news stories to gain a deeper perspective and where the community can pick up an aspect of interest and dig into it more deeply.

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