Here’s the latest Google Maps mash-up: gCensus, and a bit about the guy who created it.

Why Did You Create This?

I recently completed my Masters of Science in Computer Science at The University of Mississippi. One of the classes I took during my last semester was a course concerned with processing large quantities of data. Specifically, the course focused on scientific data collected in such fields as fluid dynamics, physics, and weather. The class was small, about a dozen people, and this allowed the class to be somewhat informal in nature. We read two or three published research papers per week and discussed the papers in round table discussions during class meetings.

One of the assigments we were given was open-ended. The assigment was to “do something interesting with a large data set”. I looked around at possible datasets and came across the census data. At approximately ten gigabytes, I thought it qualified as a large data.

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