Have you ever wondered where the lowest or highest unemployment is, where cancer rates are the highest, or specific statistical information collected about your community?

I came across an interesting web site today: This We Know.

Our mission is to present the information the U.S. government collects about every community. By publishing this data in an easy to understand and consistent manner, we seek to empower citizens to act on what’s known.

In this first phase of development, we focused on a handful of nationwide data sets from six different agencies in the data.gov catalog. We picked data sets that each had a spatial component. All the data sets were converted to RDF and loaded into a RDF database that serves as the foundation for this website.

This website’s ambitious goal is to model all of the data in data.gov and make it accessible using Semantic Web Standards. The homepage allows you to search for geographic areas. When I entered the area around my home, most of the data available revolved around factory and pollutant data.

I’d love to hear your results.

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