www.roanoke.com

DATABASES

•Caspio: http://www.caspio.com

Caspio is a paid service that allows even unsophisticated goofs like me to deploy data on the Web. Great if you don’t have a programmer in-house to get your data or mapping up for you. And compared to what you’d pay if you had to contract out the programming per job, it’s cheap. It’s not a complete substitute for a talented in-house programmer, but it’ll allow you to do lots without knowing much of anything about programming. One of the cool things about Caspio that separates it from other Web database deployment apps is they have a media division, led by a former CAR expert for the Atlanta J-C, and they really understand how news media want to display data.

•ZohoCreator: http://creator.zoho.com/

I haven’t used this,  but I checked out the tutorial. It’s geared mainly for business uses like tracking sales contacts and that kind of thing, but you could deploy a news database with it. It’s much cheaper than Caspio, but doesn’t look as friendly or as easy to use, and doesn’t have near the built in functionality.

•Dabble.DB: http://www.dabbledb.com/

Similar to Zoho in intended use and cost, and looks to be more easily adapted to news database uses.

MAPPING

•Good ol’ Google maps: http://maps.google.com

Here you can plot points by hand, add links, images all kinds of stuff.

•Using spreadsheets with Google maps: http://earth.google.com/outreach/tutorial_mapper.html

Use a spread sheet to map many points, and I think you can also embed video players in the bubbles with this method. It gives you nice-looking templates to work with.

•Umapper: http://www.umapper.com

Umapper is my new favorite mapping tool. It has the drawback of not taking uploads of data in excel or csv files, but you can upload kml files, which is the file type for google earth. So, you can take a spreadsheet with addresses in it, run it through batchgeocode.com (see below), output a kml file, and then pull that kml file into umapper and see it there. Also,this is a great way to convert shapefiles from ArcGIS to online interactives. Just add the "export to kml" extension to your ArcGIS, load up whatever map layer you want to put online, export that layer as a kml file, and then pull it into umapper. Now you have an online interactive version of it.

•Mapbuilder: http://www.mapbuilder.net/

With this site you can easily upload data with mappable addresses and get it all plotted in a matter of a few minutes. Mapbuilder geocodes the addresses for you.

•FMAtlas: http://fmatlas.com/atlas2/jsp/login.jsp

I haven’t used FMAtlas much, but you can set your map up for Wiki-style editing, so your users can add points, text, links and even images themselves.

•Batch geocoding: http://www.batchgeocode.com/

Some mapping sites require you to have latitude and longitude. This site adds lat and long for you so you can spit it back out for use on other sites, or you can embed their map.

•Finder! and Maker!: http://finder.geocommons.com/ and http://maker.geocommons.com/

These two sites work together to allow you to create GIS maps with multiple layers, without blowing $500 or $1500 on a new application. I've only toyed with this, as I have next to know understanding of the key file types needed for this kind of mapping, but it's pretty darn cool. Two drawbacks that I can see. So far at least, you can't embed your map on a web page or blog. But it's still really useful as an analysis tool. And it doesn't seem to like Firefox at all, so you'll need to use it IE. I haven't tried it in Safari or the new Google browser yet.

GRAPHICS

•Many Eyes: http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/app

This site from IBM allows you to upload data and convert it to a variety of interactive graphics you can then embed on your site. Great stuff here.

•Swivel: http://www.swivel.com

Similar to Many Eyes, but you can only embed bar graphs on your site.

•Information Design Patterns: http://niceone.org/infodesign/

This site is mainly a reference to help you think of data visually. It’s got a huge range of graphic presentation types explained so you can think of how to display data best in a visual way.

Healthcare data is here