The Tribune Sunday unveiled a new data-mapping website called Neighborhoods that offers residents an easy way to see what's going on where they live.

The website, which represents the nation's first large-scale deployment of the OpenBlock software, features arrest reports, emergency dispatch activity, tweets that include location information, restaurant inspections, Tribune news stories and more, with most of the data being served up in real time. Users of the site also can post "Neighbor Messages" to share information with their neighbors. The data can be filtered by location and topic and viewed on a map or in a list.

Andy Waters, president and general manager of the Tribune, said the site helps fulfill the newspaper's public service mission by making government data more accessible and useful. Most of the data is available elsewhere, but it's not published in such a user-friendly format.

"It was another way to present public data, public information, in a way that we really didn't have a way to make use of or present to the public before," Waters said.

The Neighborhoods site was built using the open-source OpenBlock software, which was developed with grant funding from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The OpenBlock project, announced in 2010, includes the Tribune, The Boston Globe and OpenPlans, a New York-based software development company. The Knight Foundation gave grants of $235,000 to OpenPlans, $90,500 to the Tribune and $133,125 to the Globe.

The Neighborhoods site is at neighborhoods.columbiatribune.com and is offered free alongside the Tribune's other free content, such as the home page, calendar listings, classified ads and wire service news stories. Under the Tribune's metered model, website visitors can view as many as 10 items of locally produced content � including news stories, blog entries, archives, police reports and obituaries � for free each month before needing to purchase a subscription.

Waters said at some point Neighborhoods might include premium local content that would fall under the metered model, but it will always have a free component.

OpenBlock grew out of a previous Knight-funded project called EveryBlock.com. The Neighborhoods site already is drawing attention. A national newspaper chain has expressed interest in using the code to develop its own version of the site.

Bill Densmore, a media consultant and former fellow at MU's Reynolds Journalism Institute, said a site such as Neighborhoods increases a newspaper's traditional goal of transparency in government while helping to inform the public. "That's a great public service role of a newspaper and should tend to strengthen the relationship between the newspaper and the community," he said.

Waters said he hopes the community will embrace the site and offer suggestions for features and other kinds of data that can be incorporated. "We don't know exactly how people are going to use it, but it's something that's really exciting," Waters said.

This article was published in the Sunday, March 16, 2014 edition of the Columbia Daily Tribune with the headline "Tribune site makes data easy to find."