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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We made the decision to postpone our launch a few weeks so we could do it at Where 2.0 along with the Ignite event on May 28th.  Should be a great forum to kick things off and lots of geo type people to give us feedback and hopefully come play with it.  The good news is there is going to be lots of content to play with on day one – there are 2 billion location attributes, 25 million locations, 35,000 variables describing a set of locations, and 1500 unique datasets of information.  When we say unique data sets we don’t mean a few push pins – think census tracts level data (64,892 polygons) on occupations , demographics, what time people leave for work etc., campaign contributions (where is Barak beating Clinton) by zip code (29,699 polygons), or all the meth labs (2,228 points) busted by the DEA  (was there one in your neighborhood?).  Of course not all the data sets are massive, but you have the ability to look at the broad spectrum of data out there.

The goal is to make the world of detailed geospatial data on everything from crime statistics to meteorite strikes at your finger tips.  You can mashup any of the interesting data you find or add your own.  The best part is when you contribute data you have a huge selection on content to instantly mash it up with.  You can make maps to tell your story on GeoCommons and share those with others or download the raw data as KML and come up with something on your own.  We’ll be pushing out the new version of GeoCommons  to our beta group on the 12th of May.  If you’d like to join the beta group drop us a line at info@fortiusone.com.

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