Structuring Unstructured Data and Augmented Reality
I had heard about Everyblock.com in the context of it being the continuation of the chicagocrime.org by Adrian Holovaty. I had never really poked at it though, mostly because it didn’t yet have info for my area yet. But then yesterday I was listening to the Udell interview with Holovaty and picked up some interesting threads.
The first is the applicability of the project to something like augmenting reality. As it is right now Everyblock is sucking in info from all over the place, scraping information out of it and unifying where it can, and presenting all the data together for a location. There’s definitely usefulness for finding out what’s going on in your neighborhood as a direct consumer. And for journalists it helps with trend spotting and information correlation. However if you reorganize the info around rates of change or concentration instead of events you could make some great mobile apps. Like an overlay for a Google maps style app that would alert you if you’re headed into a high crime area. The plan it to emit structured data back out of Everyblock in addition to offering the site directly on top of the data. When that happens it might allow some interesting apps that would otherwise be impractical or impossible right now.
The other bit that I found interesting was Jon’s comment that the evolving role of librarians in local libraries could include organizing and cataloging sources of local information such as the crime data or building permit info that Everyblock is currently doing. That’s an interesting angle on the role of the librarian and the library in our current information rich environment.
