Want to know the crime statistics near your favorite bar? The health inspection record at your favorite restaurant? The closest place to recycle hazardous materials?
It’s easy to answer those questions (and many more) in three of our great urban areas. New York City, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., have all made city data sets available to third-party developers—and the result is a fascinating array of apps that sift through the official info and makes it more useful to users.
For example: San Francisco Crimespotting offers a sleek interface for exploring police report data. Pan and zoom the map, filter by time of day and type of crime, and slice the data by time period. In NYC, a BigApps competition drew some great entries like Bookzee (put in a book title and your iPhone will tell you the nearest public library that has it) and NYC Greenmarket (find times and sites for city-licensed sale of farm-fresh foods).
But the data bonanza is not limited to developers. All three cities make the information available to everyone, and even provide an assortment of formats and viewing tools. The DC Data Catalog offers serve-yourself downloads for permit records, purchase orders, code enforcement incidents, and much more. Choose .csv files, .xml, rss feed, or even geospatial data formats. NYC Data Mine and Data SF provide similar functionality.
These programs—along with similar initiatives in several states–are offshoots of Data.Gov, a service designed to “increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government.” The Data.Gov site averaged more than 5,000 visits a day in April 2010, and logged more than 100,000 downloads. Visitors come from all over the world, with Canada and the UK topping the international list. Germany and China are following just behind.
