The Baltimore Sun Looks at Online Crime Mapping

The article titled “Putting crime on the map” was in the Sunday paper. It focuses on CrimeReports.com a online solution available for $99/month for small municipalities and $199/month for lager ones, based on the amount of data. It also notes ratemycopy.com a site that allows individuals to rate cops, just like restaurants and movies. (I’d not heard of the latter.)

Key tidbits:

RateMyCop.com attracts about 200,000 unique visitors a day; in Washington alone, 20,000 people have signed up for CrimeReports.com’s localized crime e-mail alerts, officials for the companies said.

So far, police departments from 175 jurisdictions contribute data to CrimeReports .com, and the site is working to integrate 100 more agencies, he [founder Greg Whisenant] said.

Adrian Holovaty, a journalist and Web developer whose latest project is EveryBlock.com, a site that feeds up-to-the-minute news and information to residents in Chicago, New York City and San Francisco. He said searches pertaining to crime are the most popular activity on EveryBlock.com.

I get that municipalities are jumping CrimeReports.com. I’m disappointed that the big draw on EveryBlock is crime. I thought it was about hyperlocal news. But perhaps news = crime?

What’s the next ESRI Summit?

The ESRI Surveying and Engineering GIS Summit is in its fifth year this August. The ESRI Remote Sensing and GIS Summit debuts at the same time, just before the formal Monday opening of the ESRI International User Conference. Also occurring before the main event are the Executive Summit (invitation only) and the Education User Conference, EdUC.

Of these, I’ve only managed to attend EdUC (I have a standing commitment to ride in or volunteer at the Pan Mass Challenge bike event, which often occurs the Friday/Sat preceding UC). It’s just great and I hope I can attend again somehow, now that I’m teaching again. The Executive Summit, which my colleague Joe Francica has attended (his 2005 review), is all about helping executives “get” or “get more” out of GIS.

But these “new” summits are different. They are, from what I gather, opportunities to build bridges with related disciplines. I use that term with care. A discipline has its own rules, its own tools and technologies, in these cases, tools and technologies allied with GIS. I want to contrast disciplines with “industries” or “business areas.” While ESRI does have a “surveying industry manager,” Brent Jones, who hails from the Northeast, somehow it doesn’t fall into the same space as other ESRI “industries.” It’s more like the “industry” I used to manage at ESRI, the one called “CAD.” Surveying, like CAD and remote sensing, is horizontal and serves many industries. Other ESRI industries, oil and gas, pipeline, water, insurance, forestry, agriculture and others tap into GIS to better serve their customers and their bottom line. Surveying, photogrammetry, remote sensing and even CAD are more about data creation and preparation. They are sometimes thought of more as “inputs” to spatial databases and analyses. 

So, what will be the next summit ESRI will announce? Will it be LiDAR? CAD? GPS? Location determination? User generated data? With what other technologies does ESRI and by extension the rest of the GIS establishment need to build bridges?