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

We’ve been playing around lately with some new data visualization techniques, so I started poking around to see what approaches have been generating buzz of late. In the process I came across Stamen Design’s very cool “Oakland CrimeSpotting” via Brady’s post on O’Reilly Radar. We’d been really impressed with what they did at Where 2.0 with Trulia and their latest further pushes the frontier.

Once I was done being wowed by the visual I found, Stamen had some thoughts similar to ourselves on the importance of public data being more accessible to…well the public. Specifically,

“We’ve found ourselves frustrated by the proprietary systems and long disclaimers that ultimately limit information available to the public. As citizens we have a right to public information. A clear understanding of our environment is essential to an informed citizenry.”

That is the biggest mission of GeoCommons and it is encouraging to see other folks feel similarly. The sad thing is that in order to gain easy access to much of this data folks pay third party providers. One of our developers, Minh, passed along a list of data you can buy from Pushpin, including ESRI supplied Census data. Census data comes from the government, all our tax dollars pay for it – why do we pay twice? I’m not intending to pick on ESRI or Pushpin – the whole industry does it, and for many free data sources other than Census.

The good news is there has been a real ground swell to change the market. Whether it is OpenStreetMaps, ShapeWiki, or OpenAerialMaps crowdsourcing geodata or Swivel and WeoGeo opening up public data for easy consumption there is some real momentum to change the market place and business model. Specifically on the Census front Bill, aka Mr Data McFindsAlot, just posted up Census tract level data for the entire US by state. You can download any of it as KML or access it through our data and mapping API’s. Census data, though, is just the tip of the iceberg of whats out there. My latest favorite “Pirate Attacks” a detailed dataset with lat long locations of real deal pirate attacks last year.

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