
In October, Wired magazine published a great article about New York City's 311 call center. The service was launched in March 2003 to provide citizens with government information and non-emergency services.
The article is accompanied by two stunning visualizations of more than 100 million calls received by the 311 service since its launch. The 2 charts break the data into time and location.
The article is accompanied by two stunning visualizations of more than 100 million calls received by the 311 service since its launch. The 2 charts break the data into time and location.

311 offers information about more than 3,600 topics: school closings, recycling rules, homeless shelters, park event etc, but also receives people's "quality-of-life" complaints and queries. Each complaint is logged, tagged, and mapped to make it available for subsequent analysis.
Such visualizations of urban public data can not only give an overview of common city problems, it also can provide insight into ways to solve these problems and improve City government.