Crowdsourcing Official Source Data and International Flavor on GeoCommons

We have been officially launched for a week, so I thought I’d pass along some of the usage trends we’ve seen on GeoCommons. We’ve really appreciated the positive coverage from folks in the community and the traffic it has driven to the site. The best news so for is people are making maps – 822 – in the first week. Not a gigantic number but encouraging.

I spent a good part of the morning going through the maps to see what users were making. It was really a cool collection of topics and it was great to see the number of international maps that were being made with new crowd sourced international data. Once I translated the titles I made a short list of some of the coolest ones:

Nature Preserves in Austria

Irish Wifi Hotspots

Montreal Cinemas by Number of Screens

Precipitation Data for Andalusia Spain

Train Routes in Northern Spain

Belgian Cycling Routes

CIC ATM’s in France

Credit Mutuel ATM’s in France

Archaeological Dig in Heathrow Airport (big map takes a while to load)

My favorite part was that each one of these maps brought new international data to the commons for everyone to share. Another encouraging trend was owners of official source data sharing their data through GeoCommons. The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene – Bureau Epidemiology Services, GIS Center shared their “Community Health Survey 2006“. It has to be some of the best metadata I’ve seen for a contributed data set yet. Some of the variables are fascinating, everything from percentage of the population who smoke or are obese to some interesting sexual patterns. I made this quick map for “Mental Distress on Wall Street”

Interesting the Financial District is such a hotbed of mental distress….hmmmmm. We’ve had several inquiries about sharing official source data through GeoCommons and looks like some wonderful opportunities to get valuable data out to the public for consumption. It won’t happen over night but the prospect of being able to crowdsource data directly from the official source has some great potential to span the current gulf between data and the public.