I wanted to try out some mapping systems, so I finished up that scraper for the San Francisco Health Code Violation Database that I had been meaning to write. I first wanted to try it out on an installation of GeoServer a Java servlet based implementation of the OpenGIS spec, but I had problems getting it installed correctly. Impatient to see the data plotted, I tried out RDF Mapper which is a project from a guy I met last weekend named Jason Harlan. I stuck the data into a PostgreSQL database and wrote a little perl script to put all of the businesses who had health code violations in the past inspection period into an RDF Map file. Here's the result: San Francisco Health Code Map (or click on the static map below to get to the interactive one).

Update: The city has changed its web site, so clicking on the restaurant names is broken temporarily until I can compensate for their changes. You can still look up restaurants by name using the city's search form.

I like RDFMapper, it's super easy to use and very snazzy!

I'd like to try to plot all of the businesses, but make them a differnt color for ones that had no violations. This way you could get an idea of where the seedier and cleanlier parts of the city might be. I also need to scrape past violations so changes over time could be plotted.