The Honolulu Police Department’s announcement of a new online crime mapping project prompted an interesting email from Ryan Ozawa:

Here’s a fun mental exercise…

HPD has unveiled an online map service where you can see five types of crime on a map and register for email alerts for crimes reported in your neighborhood. Mapped crimes go back 90 days. The reports I’ve seen describe it as a feature of the HPD website, but it’s nothing but a link to a third-party mainland company called CrimeMapping.com. HPD is apparently giving CrimeMapping.com a data feed from its own database to populate the online map and provide the notification service:

http://www.crimemapping.com/map/hi/honolulu

Per KHON, HPD is happy that they’re paying $100 a month for the service, and the contract is for a year. But I would think easily half a dozen local companies would propose providing the same service for free, just to have access to the data. My present employer included. I bet my geek friends would love to mashup this stuff with other data sets and mapping tools to do some useful and creative things.

In fact, I think a case can be made that the data being sent out to CrimeMapping.com is technically public data, and should be made available to anyone. Now that some technical work has apparently been done to establish this data conduit for a mainland vendor, can a case be made that said “firehose” also be used to provide information service to others?

I’ve been really curious about HPD data ever since I’ve seen at least one local company taking its traffic incident reports and republishing them on a website and in a mobile app that generates revenue with advertising. I contacted HPD to ask where the data was coming from, and whether their license allowed for the republication, particularly for purposes of making money. Suffice it to say, they didn’t have an answer (though frankly I’m not sure they understood the question).

Meanwhile, the subject line on an email from Sam Slom’s “Smart Business Hawaii” caught my eye earlier this week: “Waste + Fraud exposed on Hawaii Sunshine”.

Turns out he was hyping a new web site from the Grassroot Institute, www.HawaiiSunshine.org. It’s described as a searchable database of spending data from “nearly” every state agency.

Although the promise of exposing “waste & fraud” has yet to be fulfilled, the Grassroot folks deserve credit for putting this database together. At minimum, it will provide a better idea of how state procurement works, and sustained browsing is sure to turn up leads to bigger stories.

Well, and then again, maybe not. Data doesn’t automatically lead to reporting. Doug White’s extended foray into internal documents from the governor’s office illustrates the difficulty of making sense of large amounts of raw data.

Now that there’s a network of data freaks, including Ryan’s “geek friends”, willing and able to take raw data and make it readily available to the public, we also need a network of analysts ready to join forces in massaging the data to identify relevant and interesting patterns or anomalies worth pursuing further. Think about all the public employee salary data that’s now been laid bare, and the relative paucity of reporting triggered by it. The data is only the beginning.