City of Madison tech staffers say they 're making progress on plans to give residents better access to crime stats through an interactive map designed to be accessible to anyone with an Internet connection.

The Web-based map, to be designed to pop up on the city of Madison 's site, should be up and running by the end of this year, officials said.

"Those are still the plans, " said Dave Faust, Madison 's information technology manager. "We 're working on that. "

For years, the city of Milwaukee has provided such data, with some technical disclaimers, to its residents on a Web site that marries police reports with census data, housing violations and other information.

Anyone can log onto www.city.milwaukee.gov/compass/

to conduct searches by police district or neighborhood or even parts of neighborhoods. The data is heavily used by individuals looking to buy houses and by citizens ' groups seeking to address crime patterns in their neighborhoods, Milwaukee police spokeswoman Anne E. Schwartz has said.

The main sticking point preventing a similar offering here is that Madison and Dane County agencies have different systems for coding addresses, a glitch that must be fixed in the Police Department 's existing database, numbering about 2 million records, and for any new incidents dispatched from the county 's 911 center.

City officials plan to either hire a contractor to clean up the existing records or use city staff to do it, after a recent pilot project using city employees went well, Faust said.

City staff from a few agencies tried to fix a small sample of records "just to see how bad it was, " Faust said, and they were able to get about 80 percent of the sample cleaned up.

"So now we 're rethinking whether we need to hire a contractor (to clean up the old data) or whether we can do it in-house, " he said.

Before that, though, the coding problem must be fixed so new bad records don 't continue to get generated and added to the Police Department 's records database, Faust said.

"We 're trying to stop the bleeding, if you will, " he said.

The city is now in contract negotiations with the city 's GIS (geographic information systems) vendor to build a tool known as a "Web service geocoding piece, " Faust said, which would ensure the address coding from different agencies is in agreement before dispatch data reaches the Police Department 's records system, which is known as New World.

"We want to take the calls from dispatch and geo-code them before they go into the New World system, " he said.

When the interactive map is up, residents should be able to go to the city of Madison 's Web site and see police and fire and EMS calls from around the city.

Faust said the glitch-fixing work should be done by the end of June, making the promised launch of the interactive crime map by the end of this year still "absolutely " doable.

-- Karen Rivedal

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