Information overload? San Jose can help

City of San Jose

San Jose is the third largest city in California with a population of nearly one million. It is the heart of Silicon Valley. A lot of innovations take place in San Jose and this is one of the reasons a lot of entrepreneurs choose San Jose as their home. San Jose is the center for many start up companies. Young adults who want to start a new life choose San Jose for many reasons among which is the technological advancements.

San Jose is growing

The city of San Jose is growing at a rapid pace. It is a melting pot for a lot of young adults from all over the world. It is a city which offers many technological and cultural advancement and diversity. Given that California is the 5th largest economy in the world and San Jose is the third largest city in California, it offers many advantages over many other cities and communities in California and other parts of the United States. Unfortunately with this phenomenal growth, comes a lot of challenges. Information overload being among the top of these challenges.

Housing information, safety information, restaurants, banks, city planning, police reports, crimes, cultural events are information that we are all interested in, yet they are scattered in hundreds of sites. Some of these sites are also outdated, are non factual and many times report issues that are no longer available or are outdated.

Information overload

In general, for any large community such as San Jose, for anyone, young or old, choosing the right community is their #1 issue. There is not a day where we turn on the TV or read in the paper or the Internet to find out about a murder or a child molestation or some crime that has taken effect in a neighborhood. It is also shocking that a lot of times , the folks in that neighborhood state that their community was calm and quiet and they simply did not know about an individual who commits such a hideous crime. One should question, how is it possible that we live in the middle of an information age and in community where we know almost everything, yet we do not know anything about what happens next door? The information seems to be all there. It is on Facebook, and Twitter and blogs and city databases. Yet these pieces of information are all disjointed and any person who wants to know anything about anyone or a particular community has to do a Google search and visit 20 different websites and correlate all the information to make any meaningful information. There are sites that offer information about criminals, where they reside and what their records are. There are sites where we can find out about crimes. There are sites where we can find out about schools, There are sites where we can find out about housing and their prices. Yet, for various reasons, these are all disjointed and anyone who desires to know this information in one place has to correlate a lot of data from a lot of places to be able to make a logical and perhaps at times incorrect decisions about the place they want to live.

Proposal

I believe it is possible through web crawling, effective database queries, information gathering and various partnership with other government, and city governance, the city of San Jose can be the first city in the world where it can use the information age and its technological and its diverse community to gather one of the largest databases of community information about its community. This is not just about criminal or child molesters who live near by, but also about city planning, future community events, schools, banks, restaurants and the community as a whole. If a family decides they want to move to a location in San Jose, they shroud not have to visit Zillow to know about housing, city planning to know about future city plans, crime reports through police reports and sites that show child molesters and various sites to decide if this is the place where they want to raise a family.  

Data Analytic

Today, the data is all there. Unfortunately as I mentioned above, it is all scattered throughout the internet. Anyone who desires to know about a specific location has to do a lot of homework and times reach a conclusion that maybe faulty or incorrect. The city of San Jose can build a large database of information and analyze various data and present this data in a nice user friendly fashion to individuals who currently reside in San Jose or want to make San Jose as their next home. This can be done via crawlers, SOAP or RESTFUL APIs where various social medias can use to feed various information to the city. The city can then correlate this massive data and store it in a NOSQL database such as MongoDB or MarkLogic. It can then provide a nice search with meaningful data to individuals about their city location , property or individuals who reside in their communities. These are all public data so no proprietary information is used to violate any individual's rights.

Conclusion:

San Jose is one of the most advanced cities in the world and we all have access to any information we want. However, this information is  all scattered and can not be used in a meaningful fashion. San Jose can be the first city in the world that can truly gather safety, security, planning, property, financial and city events in one comprehensive site in one place.