Mashups Proliferate for Crime Mapping
The idea of a mashup is a child of the expanding use of web 2.0 technology implemented by Google, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay and other innovative applications for the web. A mashup is a combination of 2 or more web services brought together to create a new service based on data already available for other purposes. The trend in crime mapping probably got started when Adrian Holovaty, a Chicago-based Web developer with a background in journalism and databases, created a mashup of crime data published by the Chicago Police Department with a Google API to display crime data on on the map of the city. You can search on crime types and other parameters to display the crimes in a particular area of the city. Holovaty is not affiliated with the Chicago PD, and goes to great lengths to stipulate that this site is not an official site of the PD, but also cites his sources of information.
Other individuals and agencies have followed this model. ProgrammableWeb, a site that tracks mahups, reports 27 different mashups in place related to crime information, ranging from Berkeley, CA to Dublin, Ireland and including places such as Grand Rapids, MI and Houston. Mashups have been built to display addresses of sex offenders in an area, and many other crime related parameters. There's even a national incident listing run by a part-time programmer that allows public safety agencies to publish a national directory of incidents and consumers to subscribe to emergency notifications.
Mashups are all over the web, for a variety of uses including things like finding the closest Starbucks. However, local government CIO's are looking more serioiusly at using this concept to support a lot of other services for the public, such as locationg government facilities (police and fire stations, for example).
Peter Gibler's article in the Wisconsin Technology Network notes that "Patricia Seybold of the Seybold Group has an excellent review of mashups that attributes their growth to the "emergence of open and human-readable application interfaces (APIs), using protocols like eXtensible Mark Up Language (XML), widespread syndication of information through Really Simple Syndication (RSS), and Internet social etiquette promoting "opening up" applications and information for re-use and re-mixing." In addition to these factors, the increased processing speed of today's computers coupled with increased broadband speed is contributing to the expansion of mashups."
With its orgins in music and video combinations, it is not a stretch to envision other services that can be developed and used directly in the law enforcement enterprise to combine the pervasive video cameras being deployed with such systems as gunshot detection or other sensor systems. Companies are exploring the use of mashups to create such multi-purpose combinations. At the last IJIS Institute/NCJA Annual Justice and Technology forum, David Clement, CTO of Visiphor demonstrated a mashup built around the ubiquitous Microsoft EXCEL platform that combined several web services into a single application.
Microsoft recognizes the potential of Web 2.0 applications. Ray Ozzie on his blog talks about the potential of mashups and the tools that Microsoft will be developing to support the new concepts of Web 2.0 and its related technology.
New companies and new applications from existing companies are likely to show up in the justice world, and smart developers from government and industry will also find ways to integrate applications through mashups.
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