The Mexican Government is investing heavily in open data to directly make government more effective and the country more productive. As part of this strategy the Government of Mexico created datos.gob.mx a massive data portal with open public data from across the Government. We worked with the Office of the President of Mexico to build a mapping tool that integrates directly with datos.gob.mx to provide rich storytelling ability.

Mapping open disaster response data

The first test of the mapping tool was to map all 2013 funds provided by Civil Protection Service for disaster response and reconstruction. The map plots thousands of reconstruction projects across 45 natural disasters, including Hurricane Manual and Ingrid which affected two-thirds of Mexico, killing 192 people and causing $75 billion pesos in damage.

The mapping tool allows ministries to quickly stand up a rich interactive map off of any dataset on datos.gob.mx through a single page of markdown. The map generation tool anticipates many of the way in which Ministries aggregate and display information, while also making it easy for advanced users to develop more sophisticated visualizations.

We leaned on Jekyll for the map templating ability and mapbox for base layers. Datasets are pulled in over the CKAN API and rendered in real time. All the code for the map generation tool is open source, on github, and available to other governments interested in mapping open data.