Earlier this month I happened across a blog post from a company called OpenDataSoft (ODS) in which they described how they put together and mapped a list of over 1,600 Open Data portals around the world. I thought that was pretty cool, and did a little exploration of their web-based platform and decided to try my hand at some data enrichment and publishing. I trolled the City of Calgary Open Data website for something I thought might work well and settled upon their List of City Amenities (dog parks, EMS stations, arenas and such). While they offer all the data as a .csv file, the geographic / mapping file was completely separate, and I wanted to try to put it all together into one nifty application.
For my purposes, the .csv provided by the city was juuuust short; it didn't include any postal codes with the addresses, so I couldn't automatically generate a map with ODS. I ended up throwing the addresses at http://geocoder.ca/ which allowed me to grab the postal codes. Then I realized that at this time, ODS only maps postal codes in France (they're based in Paris). SO I grabbed an API key from Google Maps (linked to from within ODS) and THEN I was able to generate the desired map. There were a few outliers that I had to manually correct, but here's the result. Note the filters on the left - that was added with an option with ODS, and then there's the separate map tab, which again is an enhancement over what the City provided. I did take a look at the City's .kml file in Google Earth - it wasn't very useful, or accurate, IMHO.
There are a number of share/embed options, including the ability to download / share only filtered results. Here's a map of Calgary's Outdoor Pools (we're not a big outdoor pool city, as you might imagine):
Anyhoo, do take a look at OpenDataSoft - all this was done for free, though if you're planning to work with lots of data sets you'll have to pay, I think.
