There is a lot of data in the Your Mapper platform. Our datasets are collected by a variety of methods, from public data feeds, formatted and unformatted data, and through an official agreement with a city, state, or public entity.  Now there is a way for you to see which ones come from official sources, through official agreements with the originating data providers, so you know these datasets will always be 100% complete, accurate, and frequently updated.

Official Data Source

Official data sources are highlighted in a number of places.  If they are shown in a list on the site, they will have a small  icon that you can hover over for more information, or click to visit the source site.

The map view (see Foreclosures example) of the dataset will have a vertical banner that has some more information and also links to the source. And the overview, datalist, detail, and mobile pages (see Home Sales example) will all have a smaller horizontal banner that provides similar information and source credit.

Source Credit

We hope this gives you, the user, a bit more information about the source data, and provides governments some more motivation to open up and share their data with Your Mapper and their citizens.

The Louisville PVA has provided Your Mapper with official recent residential home sale data for the city of Louisville, KY, and we’ve turned it into an interactive map for you.

Recent Home Sales Date Chart

Louisville Recent Home Sales Map Details

The resulting map shows 100% of the 3,315 recently transfered homes across Jefferson County. Since the data is from an official agreement with the PVA, all locations have been geocoded with rooftop accuracy. Additionally, they used the Open Municipal Geodata Standard to format the data, which makes it easy for us to import it and automatically convert it to KML, RSS, CSV, etc for our users.

We hope this map gives some insight into the local issues and clustering of recent home sales and economic recovery.

The Louisville PVA has provided Your Mapper with official property foreclosure data for the city of Louisville, KY, and we’ve turned it into an interactive map for you.

Foreclosure Heatmap

Louisville Foreclosure Map Details

The resulting map shows 100% of the 1,282 foreclosed homes across Jefferson County. Since the data is from an official agreement with the PVA, all locations have been geocoded accurately. Additionally, they used the Open Municipal Geodata Standard to format the data, which makes it easy for us to import it and automatically convert it to KML, RSS, CSV, etc for our users.

We hope this map gives some insight into the local issues and clustering of increasing housing foreclosures.

UsefulTools, is “a web magazine for people who love web tools and apps,” and on Friday they listed Your Mapper as their featured Tool of the Day with the title “Local Data at Your Fingertips.”

UsefulTools

Your Mapper Tool of the Day

They posted a detailed writeup of our services.  Here are some of their comments:

YourMapper is website where you can access helpful, informative maps about a particular area.

The information you can get from YourMapper depends on what is in the system for your area, but can include maps of local historic sites, maps of pollution sites generated from EPA data, meth lab busts, crime statistics, locations of known sex offenders, political information, bridge safety and more.

Even for my small town, I was able to pull information about local sources of pollution, local historic sites, and local meth lab busts. Good to know…

YourMapper also makes it easy for you to embed relevant local maps on to your own website, free of charge. Developers can also access the API to incorporate YourMapper into their own apps. The data on the maps is viewable on mobile phone browsers, also, so you can access it from wherever you are.

YourMapper is attractive and easy to use, and it’s cool that you can take their maps and embed them onto your own site. Competitor Everyblock offers a somewhat similar service, but only for major cities. As someone who doesn’t live in a major city, I appreciate the fact that YourMapper lets me access even the limited data available for my small town.

YourMapper would be useful for anyone planning a vacation or a move to an unfamiliar area, or who just wants to learn more about where they live

Thanks a lot, UsefulTools!  Great site.

Your Mapper has a number of new features and pages that we’d like to point out to you.  Most are related to slicing and dicing our large databases in different ways and presenting the results to you visually.  We’d like to know which features you like the most, so we can know which ones to expand upon.

The third of three new features we’d like to highlight are the Location Browser pages.  Previously, we highlighted the Dashboard and the Location List page.

Browsing Locations

Every state and city that has data now have their own pages.  Starting from the national level, you can browse datasets available and drilldown geographically to the state and city levels.  You can pop up to higher levels at any time with the Location Navigation.

Location Navigation

As you drill down you can see more targeted results.  At the state level, a list of cities with a map thumbnail is shown.

California State Page

One benefit of this that you can link directly to your city’s page, for bookmarks or when emailing a Your Mapper link to your friends. For example, the link to California is simply www.yourmapper.com/location/CA and a link to Ft. Worth Texas is www.yourmapper.com/location/TX/Fort-Worth

Your Feedback

Please let us know which features you find the most useful, and any ideas you have on expanding the functionality of specific features.  Eventually each of these will have their own page, but we need your help in prioritizing their development and making sure they meet your needs.  Enjoy!

Your Mapper has a number of new features and pages that we’d like to point out to you.  Most are related to slicing and dicing our large databases in different ways and presenting the results to you visually.  We’d like to know which features you like the most, so we can know which ones to expand upon.

The second of three new features we’d like to highlight is the Location List Page.  Previously, we highlighted the Dashboard.

Location List Page

Location List

Every dataset has a new page that lists every single location in the dataset for you to browse through.  It shows basic information about each location, including name, category, address, city, and state.  There is also a link to a full info page about the location, and a link to an external detail page if available.

Dataset Navigation

The top of the page shows a summary of the map you are currently browsing, with links to other pages relating to the map.

When browsing a specific category from the Dashboard page, you can click over to see the list of locations in just that one category.

Unmatched Locations

Location Count

You can also browse a list of all the locations we were unable to match, or “geocode.”  Unmatched locations are ones that could not be placed on a map because of typos in the source data, invalid addresses, a location that is too broad, or missing information.  We provide these here for you to browse so you have access to all the information we have for a dataset.

Your Feedback

Please let us know which features you find the most useful, and any ideas you have on expanding the functionality of specific features.  Eventually each of these will have their own page, but we need your help in prioritizing their development and making sure they meet your needs.  Enjoy!

Your Mapper has a number of new features and pages that we’d like to point out to you.  Most are related to slicing and dicing our large databases in different ways and presenting the results to you visually.  We’d like to know which features you like the most, so we can know which ones to expand upon.

The first of three new features we’d like to highlight is the Dashboard.

Dashboard

DC Crime Reports Dashboard

Every dataset now has a new Dashboard page, which includes a summary of the dataset information, a heatmap showing the density of locations across the coverage area, a category breakdown chart which includes the number of locations in each category, a date chart showing the last 31 days of data per day, and a default address search box to get you started exploring the map quickly.  These pages can be reached by clicking on a map link on the home page, the browse list, or the location pages.

Heatmap

The heatmap shows location density across the coverage area of the entire dataset.  Each grid square is color coded from green to red, with red showing the densest areas.  An empty grid square within the blue line of the coverage area means there is no data in that part of the map.

Click on a square to see its details, and to show a link for more information. Clicking ‘Explore This Area’ will take you to the dynamic map centered at that location.

The granularity of grid squares is dependent on the number of points in the dataset, due to performance and data issue.  The less points in the dataset, the more squares we can display.  Some datasets have too many points to show efficiently in a heatmap, so these show a simple coverage area square instead.

Category Breakdown

The categories for a dataset are shown sorted by most common.  Each shows the number of locations per category, the percentage the total, and a blue bar showing this percentage relative to the other categories.

Category Specific Dashboard

You can click a category to move to a page devoted just to that category.  This new page will show a category-specific heatmap, location count,  and date chart.

Date Chart

For datasets that have date information, a chart showing the locations per day over the last month is shown.  This can show you recent trends and data available.  Each day and month is clickable, taking you to an interactive map for that date range.

Your Feedback

Please let us know which features you find the most useful, and any ideas you have on expanding the functionality of specific features.  Eventually each of these will have their own page, but we need your help in prioritizing their development and making sure they meet your needs.  Enjoy!

Programmable Web, one of the very first websites to catalog all kinds of map mashups and open APIs since 2005, has listed the Your Mapper API in its open database.

Your Mapper API on Programmable Web

Our API (Application Programming Interface) allows anyone to grab any of our maps, locations, metadata, and more on-the-fly to create their own web applications and mashups.  This means that the data we collect is not just locked up in our database and our website.  It is available for anyone to use in their own websites by reading our extensive API Documentation.  Since we load and store all our data in the Open Municipal Geodata Standard format, we can automatically export it as XML, JSON, CSV, RSS, GeoRSS, KML, XOMGL, and HTML, or any new format that comes along.

And if you are a casual user, the API also lets you grab RSS feeds of your searches for your home page, KML files for Google Earth, or just CSV files so you can look at your results in a spreadsheet.

In fact, our API is so powerful, the maps and features of the actual Your Mapper site are built using the same API we make available to the public.  That makes the Your Mapper site a mashup that uses its own API!

Your Mapper Mashup on Programmable Web

One of our local affiliates, Louisville Metro Mapper, also uses the Your Mapper API to get most of the data for its maps.  Metro Mapper is listed at Programmable Web as a mashup.

In addition to being a proponent of open data on the federal level with Data.gov, Washington DC is also hands-down the best municipal area in the entire nation when it comes to putting their data online. That’s why we are thrilled to be one of their Top Non-Government Apps in their new App Store!

Washing DC Crime Reports App

DC publishes much of their city data in their online data catalog. Last week, the city launched a first: a government site that features people who use their open data. A small slice of Your Mapper, its Washington DC crime report map, has made it to the Top Apps area. Take a look at our app details and the other people that have used the DC data for the public, and leave us a rating and a comment about how you use Your Mapper, even if it’s not for DC crime.

And to think, it took us less than 2 hours to grab the data and create the map. (Tweets: 1 2 3 4 5 6)

We are working on some interactive heat map technology for all of our maps and data, and we’re very excited about it so we wanted to share it now.  The goal is to start showing the massive amounts of data we have in different formats to help reveal trends and interesting stories.

Crime in San Francisco, CA

Heat maps can not only show the density of data across entire sets, but they can also show areas where there is no data, which can be just as interesting.  For instance, you might want to see where there are no crimes or sex offenders or republicans at all, in addition to seeing where there are many.

Here are links to some prototype static heat map results from a few of our datasets.  Click a colored grid for a popup, where you can link automatically to that area on Your Mapper with a detailed search.  The KMZ link is good for viewing in 3D in Google Earth.

• Meth Lab Busts across the United States (KMZ file)
• Crime in San Francisco, CA (KMZ file)
• Crime in Washington, DC (KMZ file)
• Crime in Richmond, VA (KMZ file)
• Crime in Anchorage, AK (KMZ file)
• Crime in Albuquerque, NM (KMZ file)
• Crime in Fort Worth, TX (KMZ file)
• Sex Offenders in Kentucky (KMZ file)
• Restaurant Density in Louisville, KY (KMZ file)
• Sex Offenders in Louisville, KY (KMZ file)
• Republican Donations across Louisville, KY (KMZ file)
• Democratic Donations across Louisville, KY (KMZ file)
• Crime in Highlands, Louisville, KY (KMZ file)

Note that the final version of this will be fully interactive, where you can draw the bounding box interactively on a map, and filter by categories, date range, or keywords too in real-time.  That way you can get to the data and trends you want to see, much like you can now.  For example, you could just show the density of assault crimes only in your neighborhood for the past  month.  Or maybe all the restaurant areas with a good health review and the keyword ’sushi.’

For the techies out there, we are trying to overcome a few browser and database issues.  One is that to generate a heatmap that is a 50×50 grid like the ones you see here, it requires 2,500 database queries to get the count of the number of locations within each grid.  It takes a few seconds for maps with hundreds of thousands of points.  We are working to streamline the queries and create optimized database views for this.  Another issue that the resulting KML files are between 500 and 1,000 K, so that’s a lot of data to send to the user.  We might be able to compress them into KMZ files first, which shrinks them 10 to 30 times smaller.  The last issue is that the browsers can have some trouble showing 2,500 polygons on a map.  This one might not be fixable, so we could default to a 20×20 grid (400 squares) and the let advanced users bump it up to 50×50 or anything in between.  If you have some suggestions for these issues, please let us know.