Andrew Trice

Friday March 06, 2009

Census Mashup Redux

Back in 2007, I created a mashup combining US Census information with Flex charting capabilities and map visualization. I've gotten a ton of positive feedback on it, and am grateful that it was such a success. I've been contacted that it has been used by school teachers in their classes, real estate agents, researchers, insurance analysts, and many others.

Recently, the web services that provide the census information changed, and my mashup was broken for at least a month. Now, I'm happy to say that it has been reborn!

You can check it out here: http://www.cynergysystems.com/blogs/blogs/andrew.trice/census/#



The mashup combines multiple data sources to provide a geographic and demographic data dashboard based on US Census information. It uses services powered by OpenKapow to consume data from usps.com for finding all zipcodes within a city/state. It then uses the zipcodes to lookup census information and present it to the user dashboard. All map visualization is powered by Google Maps, all weather information is powered by Yahoo!, and all demographic data provided by StrikeIron Lite Web Services.

The new changes include:

1. Updated UI look and feel, and better usage of screen real-estate.

2. I've updated it to consume the new Lite web services from StrikeIron. FYI: There is a limit of 100 requests per day, per IP address on the free services.

3. Updated to include weather information from Yahoo!.

Go ahead and take it for a test drive, and enjoy!
http://www.cynergysystems.com/blogs/blogs/andrew.trice/census/#