A few years ago Blagica Bottigliero started the website Gals’ Guide
as an online forum for young women moving out on their own an into the
“big city”. Recently, I’ve been working with her on taking the site
to the next step; building a web application utilizing the growing sets of data
about life in Chicago.[1]
The Gals’ Guide Map App is
designed to combine different datasets about the city’s various neighborhoods
into one, assisting one in finding right place to live.
The web app is, somewhere between alpha and beta stages, not
ready for general use or even rigorously browser tested, but ready for
feedback. To that end, we’ve started showing the app to our various networks to
gather feedback as it moves towards a general, full public release.
The map and features therein have been influenced by other map
mashups out there, such as the recent work done by the Chicago Tribune’s News Applications
team.[2]
Currently it incorporates data from the U.S. Census, the
City of Chicago and Groupon. But, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There are
plenty of other datasets about the city from sources such as county and state, Everyblock, Yelp, Grubhub and others.
Go, check it out and leave some feedback.
[1]
This is also the next logical step for me from coding up PHP classes for the
CTA’s API and the City of Chicago’s open data portal I started working on back
in July.