Hansen Service Requests are requests made by DC citizens and employees for specific work to be done, such as fixing a broken traffic light or emptying an overflowing recycling container. I find the Hansen records interesting because they demonstrate how tax dollars are spent to maintain the city and the OCTO provides the data in real-time.

CSI and 24 Hours not withstanding, government workers are often shackled with yesterday's technology and outdated user-experiences. I wanted to create an application that demonstrated affordable, improved functionality for front-line workers and officials.

The Daily Hansen Quick Browse Mashup demonstrates significantly friendlier web sites are within the reach of government agencies. No elaborate server-side code is required for this mashup. All interactivity occurs entirely in the browser and it is powered by open source software and free web services.

In this mashup, a web page is loaded which then calls (1) MIT's Simile Exhibit software library, and then (2) a day's worth of Hansen service requests downloaded from the OCTO data page and properly formatted to be interpreted by the Exhibit software. Lastly, the browser's Javascript engine runs the Exhibit software to interpret the data and display the information in the page. The map is from Google, but it is the Exhibit software that automatically places markers on to the map.

The DC OCTO currently maps Hansen Service Requests using Google maps, but the presentation only offers a fixed list of the service requests. There's no way to sort, filter, or search the records. The Daily Hansen Quick Browse maps the service requests, color codes them, and adds interactive sub-totaling, filtering, sorting and flipping between map and list view. Better still, the Quick Browser can easily be reconfigured for other already OCTO published data types.

I only had a limited amount of time to work on an entry, so I wanted to see what I could put together from existing pieces as a proof point. Also, current implementations of Javascript in browsers can only handle so many records before performance suffers. Exhibit recommends working only with a few hundred records at time. (Note: Javascript's limitations are already vanishing. Both Mozilla Foundation and Google have released significantly alpha versions of significantly faster and more stable Javasscript engines. )

It should also be noted that Google does have a limit on its Google map, but this is fairly high, 1000 different image requests per end-user per day.

The most important next step would be to do some server-side development to automatically format the Hansen data from different days for parsing by Exhibit. And I admit I've already begun working on a script to transform the Hansen RSS feed XML into the correct format.

• Exhibit 2.0 is licensed under New BSD License.
• DC's Data Terms of Use
• The Daily Hansen Quick Browse as a compilation is licensed under New BSD License.

• Exhibit home page
• Exhibit 2.0 source code
• See Exhibit tutorials, documentation for using google map extension.
• To see source code of the Mashup, please use your browser's view source.
• Existing Exhibit Presidents demo (v2) from which much is borrowed.

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