About PushpinWeb

Government agencies across the United States are starting to expose rich datasets previously mired in bureaucracy. The data is rich, but it's also poorly organized and inconsistently formatted. Starting with the NYC DataMine PushpinWeb will collect and index as much of the people's data as possible. The goals are to power exciting tools that aid the understanding of government resources, better use the services provided, and create accountability.

PushpinWeb was created as an entry into the NYC BigApps competition in 2009. The goal of the competition is to use datasets released by the city government at the NYC DataMine in new applications. There datasets made available by the DataMine are in a variety of formats:

• SHP - Shapes for geographic data.
• TSV - Lists of businesses, possibly addresses.
• GDB - Difficult to parse geographic point data.
• TXT - Lists of businesses, possibly addresses with sparse formatting.

PushpinWeb is a response to the inconsistently formatted and difficult to process datasets provided directly by the DataMine. Over 60 datasets from the DataMine are already published through our a RESTful JSON API. We also plan limited CSV and JSON download facilities for non-programmer analysts. Visitors interested in visual analytics can already browse and create visualizations with Processing.js.