Credit where due: the city government just did something fairly awesome. As the Post and WTOP are reporting, today dc.gov unveiled its new Crime Map application. Following in the footsteps of ChicagoCrime.org (itself the brainchild of the WaPo’s own Adrian Holovaty), you can now plot reported incidents of crime throughout the city. You can filter by location, date and the type of criminal activity. It’s an extremely compelling way to visualize differences over time and geography.

There are a few caveats. First, the site is dog-slow — but that probably has more to do with the influx of attention brought by today’s media debut. More importantly, it only works in Internet Explorer for the moment (and it seemed a bit flaky even in our copy of MSIE7). Still, once we coaxed it into functionality, the site proved to be a well-realized and useful tool.

But more than this specific piece of programming, the city deserves credit for opening up its data to the public. Interested web nerds can head here to find RSS feeds containing the information that powers the new crime map. It’s nice of the government to build a map for us, but if anyone finds it lacking, they now have the power to build their own (don’t be surprised if you hear more from us on this front in the next few weeks). Three cheers for open government! Are you paying attention, WMATA?

Map of robberies near Logan Circle generated by the crimemap.dc.gov website