AreYouSafe? -- Municipal and Federal Data Extraction, Mash-up, and Visualization

The goal of the AreYouSafe initiative is to provide citizens with an innovative delivery mechanism and visualization medium for hyper-local public safety information. AreYouSafe utilizes state and federal web accessible data catalogs which are mashed-up into standardized data formats for presentation to the end user. Leveraging the web as a platform, AreYouSafe offers web accessible heat maps as well as a simple, intuitive mobile application for the IPhone that acts as a Geiger counter for crime.

In an effort to drive transparency AreYouSafe aims to provide a visual representation of data that is, in its raw format, difficult to interpret and navigate. Collaboration with local governments, municipalities, and police departments enables a clear understanding of the data that is available, where it lives, how to gain access to it, its format, and how it aligns with that of the other cities that are part of the initiative. This data is extracted and then transformed into an easily digestible formats significantly increasing its usability.

The AreYouSafe initiative provide a valuable public service to citizens without any additional overhead from a taxpayer perspective. The data that drives AreYouSafe is already collected on a regular basis. However, the data as it exists today is silo-ed and therefore yields fractional value without being merged with other relevant statistics making it meaningful. AreYouSafe provides a new and intuitive framework for this data making it readily usable by and meaningful to the average citizen with access to the internet and/or an IPhone.