For a while we’ve been posting maps and data about breaking news stories on the blog. Often times the amount of data needed to convey the geographic perspective of a news story is more than one map or blog post can sustain. A second issue is that some news stories are persistent for an extended period of time, and maps/data need to be updated through real time feeds or just the latest quarters results.

We saw the same problem with commercial customers we work with. One map or analysis did not get the job done. They needed a collection of maps providing status on a range of indicators critical to conducting business. We decided to fuse the two concepts together into a dashboard. In this case of the demo, answering the question, “if I was the president what economic indicators would I want to see to better manage the country“. You can check out our “Dashboard for the Economy” here.

To accomplish the task we collected 15 data sets and categorized them into the following categories:

* Employment
* Foreclosures
* Stimulus
* Global Economics

When available (foreclosures and unemployment) we mapped data from November 2008 to provide an indicator of the status before Obama took office and January 2009 (or December if January was not yet available) for after he took office, and then also mapped change between the two time periods. As new data comes out we will update the maps and recalculate change from the November baseline.

The stimulus data comes from the Governor’s and Mayor’s shovel ready requests for stimulus dollars. Both data sets are broken down by:

* Cost of the Stimulus
* Expected Job Creation from the Stimulus
* Average Cost per Job Created

The global economics data comes from the International Monetary Fund’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) indicators for countries. The data includes 2007, 2008, and forecasts for 2009 and 2010. This should provide a very rough relative measure of how the America’s economic condition is comparing to the rest of the developed world.

Keeping with the mantra of transparent and open data all of the maps can be exported as KML plus you can click the hyperlink to Maker and click details to get the raw data for any of the maps. Always important that the maps and data are not bottled up, but can be taken in styled or raw form to any tool you would like to use. We like nothing better than seeing the data and maps remixed in interesting ways.

While I think the dashboard content is compelling I believe the design behind it is equally cool. The goal for the dashbaord was that the content creation, population and maintenance would require zero written code to do. The dashboard embeds like a widget and all the content is created in GeoCommons.

You simply fill out the forms above and then supply a unique tag for each category of maps you would like GeoCommons to populate. You can literally whip up a custom dashboard in minutes. We’ll be using news.geocommons.com as a place to continue to experiment with the GeoCommon’s API and also share data on breaking news stories.

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