OFF-TOPIC: Google Maps & Jackson County Sex Offenders
Greetings All !
Sorry, this post is quite off-topic for what I usually post here, but I thought some folks might be interested.
I’m not sure if I mentioned this before, but I own a small web hosting business: HomeBizHosting.com
Well, as a part of my work associated with that business, I’ve been “fiddling” around with Google Maps. And I’ve created a little database application. This tool will look through a database of Registered Sex Offenders (for Jackson County, Missouri… sorry, no other counties just yet)… and will generate a Google Map, showing where these offenders live!
Now, the data’s not perfect. I found a lot of mis-spellings and other bugs. And, in the end, 28 of the over 1500 addresses were totally bad.
However, I think you’ll find the results interesting, ESPECIALLY if you live in the same county I do !
Here’s the link: Sex Offender Maps
Now, I’ve discovered that the data is NOT complete. Surrounding counties have their own registered offenders… some of whom live in Jackson County but apparently may not be recorded in this database!!
I’m debating whether or not I want to try to include surrounding counties. Let me know what you think. (There’s a “contact us” link on the pages generated by that application. Feel free to use that to email me.)
See, it actually costs me a bit of money (and quite a bit of time) to do this. The data itself is free, but then I have to assign latitudes and longitudes to all 1500 addresses! I use an automated service (Geocoder.us to do this. But their automated service costs money.
And then I manually went in and assigned latitudes and longitudes to most of the addresses that this automated latitude and longitude lookup failed on. (A lot of the failures were due to apartment numbers being at the end of the address, mis-spellings, putting in “Rd.” instead of “Ave.” or “Terr.”, that sort of thing.) This part was very, very time-consuming.
Well, I hope you find it interesting. And a hearty “Thanks!” to Google for providing the mapping system!