The USDA just released a new tool called Your Food Environment Atlas which is essentially a giant interactive mapping data visualization about food in the US. It is a county-by-county mapping tool that draws data from USDA's Economic Research Service and mixes 90 different sets of data about Food Choices, Health and Well-Being and Community Characteristics (such as demographic, income and amenities data).Users of the service can look at the data in a few ways: they can create maps showing the data across all counties, they can view all of the county-level data for any individual county, or they can create maps of counties sharing the same degree of multiple-indicators, potentially revealing hidden relationships between various data values. For example, the map
shown is a plot of counties with high obesity rates and a relatively high occurrence of convenience stores with gas, which as you can see has almost no correlation.
I really love how transparent our current government is becoming and look forward to seeing how people integrate this data with other sets currently available. Now, if they can just get a designer in there to make this thing more pretty, it would be even better.
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