Among many breaking news stories this week there was one that made a splash just before the Internet release of the phone records. Since then it has been reported that several interest groups including those with particular point of view have been poring over these lists.

Much of these efforts and scrutiny by media has yet to produce shock and awe type of revelations. But that could change. May be the potential for a big expose` has the Media continuing to cover the story.

Since we are the map people, spatial dimension of a(ny) story is of interest to us. So Geocommons decided to digitize and geocode a subset of these phone records, specifically telephone records from two time periods, December 22, 2000 to March 22, 2001 and December 22, 2004 to March 22, 2005.

What do these maps show?

Majority of the calls originated in Washington DC proper, Silver Spring, Baltimore, Columbia, Glen Burnie and Frederick in MD; Arlington, Alexandria, Lorton and Woodbrigde in VA and a few other DC suburbs.

The rest of the hotspots are scattered across the lower 48 states, these clusters are in Southern California (Escondido); Tampa, FL (Tampron Spings area in 2005) and Orlando, FL (in 2001) and North-East Atlanta, GA.

Interestingly, the list of distinct phone numbers is relatively small, suggesting cliquishness of callers and possible exclusivity of the services. Further, a smaller subset among these can be characterized as frequent callers. Yet another interesting apsect is the temporal distribution of these calls: compared to any other month, January 2005 had the highest number of calls.

While the DC Madam scandal story is still unfolding just below the radar of attention grabbing news, intention is to digitize and geocode data for other time periods. So come back and visit us at Geocommons and use key word search ("Booty Calls") to explore maps/data.

These maps do NOT reveal locations of individuals whose phone numbers are on the DC Madam's list. Instead, these maps show patterns of spatial distribution of calls to escort service. The heat maps were generated based on totals of the phone numbers that share the first six digits of the ten digit phone number. Unlike the calling area codes which are identified by the first 3 digits, the first six digits of a typical 10 digit number helps determine the geographic locations of local exchanges to which the phone numbers are tied.

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A few weeks ago James Fee wrote a blog post about a debate he had with Steven Citron-Pousty concerning the usefulness of GeoCommons. From a high level the argument came down to the GIS vs. Neogeogrpahy debate. There were great quotes on both sides like “freaking sweet” in support and “pretty worthless” in the bashing category. Over all we were excited to see that GeoCommons had started a debate in the GIS community. The intent of GeoCommons had originally not been to provide a resource to the GIS community, but to provide access to GIS data and a few tools to the rest of the world. The GIS community always had access to the data and the tools, so I had figured GeoCommons would not even pop up on the radar. In hindsight I think we should be providing mutual resources to each other, so with that in mind here are few thoughts on the topic.

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It has been an interesting week with an article in the Washington Post and InformationWeek on the launch of GeoIQ and the upcoming data repository. Thought I‘d take some time to go into more detail with what we have in mind combing the two into the foundation of a geospatial software as a service. GeoIQ is the first step – allowing non technical users to analyze their data to make better location based decisions. In order to make better decisions you need good data, and this is where the data repository comes in.

Data is a problem that is not exclusive to us, but something that is critical to growth of web mapping in total. O’Reily, through Where 2.0, has given this topic considerable attention and we are hoping we can add our small bit to the solution. My frustration with geospatial data goes back almost a decade when we first started looking for open source data. Back then it was the beginning of the .com boom and we were looking for spatial data on fiber optic infrastructure to see if we could sort out if the Internet was going to be the end of geography. At the time the pundits were saying that the Internet would mean location was no longer important because you would be able to connect to the Internet and work from anywhere. So, we were mapping where the nuts and bolts of the Internet to see what locations could support the new business of the Internet and if the geography was actually changing.

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