Is thing on? You might have wondered. It's been quiet in the DataBlog lately.

But rest assured, your friendly data delivery editor has not abandoned you with your thirst for the maps, graphs, columns and rows. In fact, just this morning, I updated our crime report maps for Roanoke, Roanoke County and Salem.

That took all of an hour. So where the @#$@! have I been? Working hard for you, gentle reader. For the last several days, I've been chugging along learning some new tricks for delivering data. The Roanoke Times recently signed up for a new service called Caspio Bridge. Without boring you with the technical stuff -- I hope -- I'll just say that Caspio is a kind of online tool box that let's a not-so-geeky, retro-fitted writer like me put databases on the Web.

What does this mean for you, you ask?

It means that new things in the DataSphere will look a little different, and in many cases offer a whole lot more. A big difference you can see already is our ability to integrate databases and maps into a single searchable resource.

Our first roll-out of a database with Caspio as the engine is senior care resources search, that's part of the website for our series on the Roanoke area's aging population, Age of Uncertainty. Here you can search for the kind of resource you need, and not only get a result in words, but see each record your search returned plotted on a map.

There's also a way to drill down into a deeper level of detail for many of the records -- something we offer in the past without a great deal of work.

Most likely the next thing you'll see using Caspio is re-vamped crime-mapping. Here's where I'm headed: a single-search page where you can search crime records from Roanoke, Roanoke County and Salem. You'll be able to choose a single locality, or seach all at once. You can limit your search by an offense type if you want - see only burglaries, for instance, and select a date range. Your result will appear in both a table and on an interactive map.

I've got a test version of it working, but it's not quite ready to put out there for you folks yet. I won't put a date on when to expect it, but I'd guess it's a matter of days rather than weeks.

In the meantime, keep checking out the maps in their current form, won't you?

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• Posted by Matt Chittum in Public safetyPublic safety
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