For some time now, I wanted to create an app where you can view “location data”. By that I mean, any data set that has latitude/longitude pairs for locations. This can be a list of particular businesses in an area, public parks, public toilets etc.

The motive for this app came from the fact that there are a lot of datasets from local governments, which are usually hard to visualize quickly. Sure, a lot of people are building a variety of mashups for displaying the data, but they are a isolated vertical silos for each of the dataset. Why can’t we put them in a single place?

Here is the run down of what I wanted to achieve

• Allow users to upload a CSV file
• Select which columns are latitude/longitude columns
• Select which columns should describe each data point

Once the dataset is uploaded, then I want

• A map that displays all points in a clustered view – meaning, I want points that are close together to be clustered together (which makes the browsing faster)
• A list of data points that describe what they are
• A list of datasets so that users can quickly view different datasets

So, let me introduce you “Dataloco“.