Displaying Geographical Data on a Google Map A Case Study on Historical Data on Traffic Fatalities

摘要

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) maintains a database of traffic related incidences, especially traffic fatalities, collected nationwide since 1975. This database provides quite extensive details about each incident including information about persons and vehicles that were involved as well as the geographical location where the incidents happened. This information is free and easily accessible from the NHTSA website. The website also provides a query interface so that interested users can query the database for relevant information. However, using this query interface requires a good understanding of what the data represents and some expertise in developing the correct query. In this paper, we describe a different approach in which the data from the database is displayed graphically as an overlay on a Google map. Since the results are displayed on a map, the query is constructed using specific geographic coordinates (i.e., using a street address or a zipcode).