by Angela Guess
A new article reports, “Real estate website Trulia is set to roll out a new feature that will allow users to view crime statistics for 50 metro areas in the US. The new feature, which is slated for launch in June, is a valuable exercise in large scale data processing. The crime maps are based on data collected from more than 1,000 different sources, aggregated into more than 5 million data points on the maps. Block-by-block crime density from the past 12 months is presented in heatmap form, with the top 5 percent of blocks with the most crime colored dark red, the next 5 to 10 percent in light red, and so on. The maps’ update rate varies from hourly to monthly, based on when each locations’ data is available from the various third-party agencies that work directly with law enforcement.”
The article continues, “The crime map feature is made possible largely by Trulia’s December 2010 acquisition of geo-data aggregation startup Movity. Movity was part of Y-Combinator’s Winter 2010 class with the stated goal of giving home buyers information on what the location is ‘really like’ by mapping data on noise and crime. Terms of the Movity buy were undisclosed.”
photo credit: Trulia
