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One of the intriguing aspects of GeoCommons and its increasing wealth of data, is being able to harness official source and government data on our publicly available interfaces Finder! and Maker!. You can search Finder for a plethora of different types and topics of data.  You’re able to upload your own data which you’ve created or download data that others have uploaded.  I’ve spoken with several of my work colleagues and we often converse about the quality of data and what makes data most credible, most accurate, and trustworthy.  Who’s to say if data is actually spot on correct? It’s hard to say, however I’d like to think that plenty of it is, and I think our government is a good start to finding reliable data.

A recent  example of  quality data and the government making their data more transparent is with the launch of Data.gov.  The Federal Government sponsored website allows you to comb through their data catalog so you can then download the data in one of their provided formats (XML, CSV, KML, Shapefile). The U.S. Census Bureau also publishes a significant amount of their data online available primarily through XLS. and CSV. formats.

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been uploading the U.S. Census Bureau’s annual total population estimates of the resident population by sex, race, and Hispanic origin for all U.S. counties. The data is great because it lets people view their internal data within the context of an area through demographics.  Below is a map I created in Maker that shows the most recent (July 1, 2008) total population estimates for New England.  I used a thematic map with color contrast to show population densities in different counties; dark red being where there are the most people and white the least amount of people:

A couple things to note about this map and U.S. Census data:

The Census populations estimates I have uploaded include 90+ attributes, providing a break down of county population by race and Hispanic origin.  If you look in the map the drop down menu shows the total population for Hancock County in Maine.  If you scroll through the menu you can find out how many males, females, Asian males, Hispanic females, etc. make up Hancock County.

U.S. Census Bureau data will continue to be uploaded into Finder and I encourage GC visitors to make cool maps with the data.

Click here to view the map in Maker!

Click here to view U.S. Census Bureau data in Finder!

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