You love data, you desperately need data. You just don't know it.

It's just that you don't recognize it as data.

That cool weather map on the TV news that shows you with colored bands the temperatures forecast across the county?

That's data, hundreds and hundreds of figures, it's just that it's offered to you with a different kind of (nerd-word alert here) interface.

You hear "data" and think columns and rows and start to nod off in something like a narcoleptic fit.

But take that data and stick it on a map, and all of a sudden it speaks to you in a different way. Patterns emerge. New things leap out at you.

We're working to do that more and more often in the DataSphere, The Roanoke Times and roanoke.com's online data library.

Right now we've got interactive maps of homicides around the Roanoke Valley, places to see elaborate holiday lights displays and even sightings of black bears in odd spots.

Some maps are for sheer utility -- where are the most audacious holiday lights near your house? Our map tells you that at a glance. Click on a point and find the address and what you'll see when you get there.

Some are just fun. Our map of bear sightings only has six on it at the moment -- hardly enough to discern a pattern, and it's not very scientific anyway -- but, well, bears are cute, and it causes a stir when one turns up where it doesn't belong.

Then there's the serious stuff, such as crime.

Take a look at our homicide map, which documents all 25 homicides in the Roanoke region over the past two years, and a not-so-surprising pattern is very apparent. There are lots of pinpoints clustered in the region's urban center and just a few flung about the less-populated rural regions.

But what if you could do the same thing with different kinds of crime? Would that be valuable to you in learning about your neighborhood, or one you might move to, or the area around your office, or a place your children hang out?

Take a look at Web sites www.chicagocrime.org or www.richmondcrime.org to see what I'm talking about.

We'd like to do the same in the DataSphere, but at the moment there's little consistency in the crime data that we can collect from area police agencies. Some post reports online and some don't. Some are more detailed and timely than others.

Find links to the online reports that are available in our region in the Public Safety section of the DataSphere.

One noteworthy exception in our area is the town of Vinton. While Vinton happily doesn't have a great deal of crime to document, you can see it all on an interactive map on the Web (vinton.va. crimeviewcommunity.com).

We'll get there one day in the DataSphere.

In the meantime, I'll continue to look for ways to offer our data on maps and in other ways that speak loudly and are less intimidating than a blinding mass of numbers on a spreadsheet.