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About NYC BigMaps

NYC BigApps Contest

NYC BigMaps was built for the NYC Big Apps contest. We're up against some stiff competition, but check out our submission.

This site is a portal for New York City, a place to browse and discover information in your neighborhood and block that you would never have known about otherwise, and share it with others. We take complex raw data and make it visually engaging and easy to understand.

Since the BigApps contest name is a play on New York's "Big Apple" nickname, we thought we'd play on their name. Our logo and name are an homage to the contest name, with a focus on our interactive maps.

Adding More Maps

For this project, we focused on just two maps: Restaurant Inspections and 311 Service Calls. Once formatted, it would be easy to add much of the other data from the NYC Data Mine, including city events, parking facilities, property values, building permits, points of interest and trees. Each would have their own interactive map, heatmaps, and mobile app too.

There is other data that we would also love to add that is not yet public. The Suggest a Dataset and Suggest an App areas of the contest covers most of these, most notably, crime. With crime data, we could create the oft-requested interactive heatmaps, filterable by category.

Speed of Development

This entire site, including the maps, was built in just 3 days. The speed of development is due to leveraging the tools, and free and open API, provided by the Your Mapper platform.

Your Mapper allows the importing of millions of points of government data. Once loaded, the data is processed, and then can be pushed out it in different formats, including interative maps, embeddable maps, custom RSS feeds, KML file, CSV exports, mobile applications, heatmaps, and to anyone tapping the API.

Free and Open API

The Your Mapper API (Application Programming Interface) lets anyone, including us, tap into all of the data in our database on the fly. We use the API here to get map information, heatmaps, categories, and other info. When the data is updated at the source, it's updated here instantly.

Embedded Maps Tool

Your Mapper also provides the tools to customize and embed interactive maps into a website, with no technical knowledge. Just visit the Embed Map area, select your map and options, and get a chunk of code to cut and paste into your site. Violà: an interactive map for your users.

Government Services

We've worked with many city and state governments to get their data online and into public maps for their citizens. GovMapper provides the experience and web-based solutions to quickly, easily, and inexpensively turn your municipal data into maps and apps.