Those guys at Urban Mapping, famous in our industry for some of the best neighborhood boundary data, are doing more than just polygons these days. They’ve created Geo Fact Finder which had the original intention of illustrating the capabilities of their platform Mapfluence. Mapfluence is a web-based geoservices engine designed to push geo-intelligence to the browser. Mapfluence also maintains a data catalog, providing immediate and query-able access to geographic data. The Geo Fact Finder application is intended to visualize and explore geographic data; they’ve selected a subset of our 10,000+ variables and included them in different topic areas. You can select up to three topics at any one time. Built on the Bing Maps Platform, Urban Mapping created an application to visually explore a boatload of geographic data. Behind it, Mapfluence allows developers to make queries to support visualization (thematic mapping, heat mapping, etc.) and data queries (spatial joins, sorts and other number-crunching activities). What’s great is that it also comes pre-configured with data on-demand: the application includes over fifteen distinct data themes that includes several dozen specific variables. Here, I’ve mixed Presidential Election Returns, Religious Affiliation and Average Monthly Snowfall to see if there’s a connection that I can pull from them. Can you find the connection?
Themes include air quality, tornadoes, hurricanes, precipitation, temperature, transportation infrastructure, educational performance, cost of living, unemployment rates, residential and business vacancy rate, voter turnout, demographics, sales and income tax rates, and consumer expenditures. This represents a massive amount of data that Urban Mapping sources and maintains, making it easy for developers to use their Javascript API. Geo Fact Finder is designed to show off some cool visualizations of data, and they tell me there are more applications coming soon. Keep an eye on these guys.
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