Sunday, April 5, 2015

Final Project Proposal

Here's what I've got in mind:

It might be a bit bigger than I can handle, but I'd like to present my topic that allows for some slight revisions if it becomes too difficult. In this ever increasing pace of information flow, there's a lot of things one can map, like #hashtags by state or even facebook statuses.

Governments also make a much better effort these days to keep track of all their information digitally, such as public land records, crime data, fire data, school data, etc.  Some of this data is updated near instantaneously.  While not as fast or immense as a data set as social media, these potentially daily uploads of data by governments/organizations are often far more reliable.

So for my final 411 project, I would like to take on an interactive crime map of Loudoun County.

I know there are crime maps that already exist out there that get their data directly from government bodies (See: https://www.crimereports.com/)

Thus the goal of this project is not to create something entirely new that can compete with a company that does this as a business, but rather as an experience into creating really dynamic and data driven maps.

Here's the link for Loudoun's daily crime report archive:

http://sheriff.loudoun.gov/Archive.aspx?AMID=37

As you can see the data only goes up to early February, and I'm not totally sure if they just delete or take down the previous months as they go along. However, for my map (at least for this class) first to collect all the data they have, categorize by date and severity (homicide vs theft).

Then, for the map itself, like crime reports, I'll be plopping down each of the data points but color coordinate them based on severity. As an added feature I'll also make it so that users can choose the range of time of data they want to view on the map (such as the past month or from jan 2015 to feb 2015, etc.)

Finally, the map will also allow users to turn on/off certain crimes based on their level of severity (this way we can choose to just see all the severe or just to see all the small crimes)


To develop this map I was looking at using javascript and leaflet for the map itself and a tsv/csv file or even a small database for all the data. This is what I have planned for this class at the moment.

However,

If given the time and opportunity, I'd like to take this a step further, and automate the process of collecting daily information from the crime reports, put it into a database rather than just a tsv or csv, and the automatically update the map accordingly on a daily basis.  This way users have continuously updating access to local crime data.

This is likely beyond what I'll be able to accomplish during the scope of this class, but its part of the vision I have for this project. 

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