Doug McCune posted a blog entry yesterday on some work that he is doing for map based data visualization with Flex. The (impressive) video from his blog post is shown below, and he has a sample application online that you can play with.

It reminded me of a similar application that I blogged about a while back, built by the team at Stamen Design that shows new homes and buildings being built in major cities throughout the US. I love how they've implemented time into the application with animation, bringing a 3rd dimension to the 2-d application. The blog also has a number of interesting stories of cities throughout the US.

Doug's work does something similar: it exposes data in a very intuitive and easy to understand application. The magic for these applications isn't in the data or the program, its in the UI and how they're using a different approach to displaying information. One can easily imagine how this information would be displayed for most police forces today: likely in a long table, or maybe on a physical map, with push pins for certain incidences. What's really impressive about the demo is how they integrate all the information, including the location of existing patrol cars, into a single application. Its not hard to imagine how useful this app could be. That's why the demo is so good.