A Busy Week for Recovery Map
Last Friday, I was able to announce the official unveiling of Recovery Map, a new service for exploring the information about the recovery.
Over the past week, we’ve expanded a lot of the aspects of this service. Improvements to the MetaCarta search results let you more easily filter news stories from around the country. The MSER data, previously unattached to any other service, is now connected with the data from the Stimulus Watch project, with in-map visualization of popularity of projects.
In addition, we’ve expanded the storytelling capabilities of the map. Previously, you could only build a selection of layers. However, you now have the ability to *also* pull out particular projects, news articles, and more, and save the map with these available. This increases the story building opportunities of the application.
From the recovery effort in Salt Lake City, to Grand Forks Wind Power, you can now create a map that tells the story of recovery where you are.
To create a story in your map, simply click the ‘Save this’ link, which will create a draggable window that you can arrange in the map. Once you have the stories you want showing, simply click the ‘Save Configuration’ button, and you’ll have a new map URL that you can share with anyone, telling your story of the recovery.
The technology we’re using for this is nothing particularly fancy: some Django, some OpenLayers, and a couple different APIs. However, by combining the different data sources, you can quickly build a much more informative set of data, which shows information that is not possible to gain from a single map.
This is the power of tools like OpenLayers: they allow you to combine data from many sources in new and interesting ways. By combining news stories with economic stimulus data, you can see a more interesting view of both.