Hi, I’m Tom MacWright and I’d like to talk about making Open Data useful with open-source tools and cloud computing. Specifically, I’ve been working with TIGER/line data, which is a great example of incredibly useful data that we only started to tap into
In the public domain and easily combined with existing data, including 200 gigabytes of Census data
Every school district in the country, which is keyed so you can combine it with census data.
Cottage industry of people selling DVDs of free data
Now it’s fast. You can create a new server in minutes, attach this data in minutes, and start off with ready-made servers
The historical problem is that slow computers and licensed data meant that there were limited, slow ways to consume geographical data
But we can do a lot better. Mapping in the cloud, you can put together a system that scales and performs and everyone else can learn from your progress