How do people choose where to live? What are the pros and cons of one neighborhood over the next? What are the crime trends for this area and how can we use that to quickly respond? How can geographic data help us make market predictions?
With these answers, crime mash-ups and real estate mash-ups evolve to map based analysis tools for decision making, and local economic, social and political trends can be identified.
Aggregation has left us with an unfiltered abundance of wasted and fragmented data. This is the problem which draws the most criticism of user-generated content. Much of the geodata we are seeing is highly contextually dependent, yet aggregation usually isn’t tuned to pay much attention to the context of the data. Imagine if iTunes wasn’t aware of the notion of compilation albums, or even of albums at all? It would be a huge mess if songs were only treated as atomic units, totally independent of context. A geotagged snapshot of a taxi isn’t meaningful if you can’t see that it’s part of a map of “celebrity spotting”, or “all the places I’ve been mugged”. User-generated content and citizen created mash-ups are in early stages of their value contribution. To increase value, citizens require more robust tools for analyzing data and technology for visualizing large data-sets for a diverse amount of use cases from crisis management to wedding planning. We estimate that only 10% of content contributed to Platial & Frappr is of value to users outside of the mapmaker’s community. Obviously 100% is valuable to the mapmaker and a universe of people around that person even "Places I've Lived”. With richer analysis and clearer context, even seemingly irrelevant data can provide an interesting layer on top of maps for a specific region or use case. i.e.: NE Portland has a high density of dive bars, hiking, bikes, vegan food, graffiti and chai. This simple level of analysis increases the value of user-generated content in the context of understanding unique aspects of a city or neighborhood especially in comparison to other cities or neighborhoods.
New tools for analysis are available at the enterprise level and further emphasize visual intelligence for use in complex geographic projects. FortiusOne, for example, offers significant amounts of economic, political, environmental and geographic data to aid decision makers within government, NGOs and small business. Using these tools, Vancouver Sun analyzed data on more than 1.6 million parking tickets to create a dynamic map that readily pinpointed for readers exactly where they were at the highest risk for getting a ticket. That is one small example of the pervasive, decision-making information coming our way.
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