The City of Seattle, like any large municipality keeps and updates a wide range of databases. The compiled data gives them a sense of how to apply resources and provides the public with access to facts, figures and awareness of what the city has to offer. The compiled data can be seen in numbers, as graphs and even shared on Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites.
When you first go to Data.Seattle.Gov it loads the default page of the top 100 popular datasets. But by choosing another tab you can quickly see All Datasets or Suggested Datasets. If you register with the site you can even nominate some yourself as Jon Stahl did in nominating The City Council and Mayor's visitor logs, which are part of the public record. But the available data goes well beyond this level and is amazingly deep.

For example, if you wanted to know about Crime Instances by type the city database points out that larceny-theft is by far the largest crime with 53,593, followed by burglary with 14,882 citywide. If you were curious about the Crime by Precinct you would look for the designations F or W for the police beats that cover West Seattle and South Park (they are closer to the bottom of the list in the default view).

If you wanted to see a Neighborhood Map showing all the Alternative Schools, or basketball courts, children's play areas, health centers or even the heritage trees, they have it.

But possibly, you have grown weary of looking at a screen all day and just want to go out and drop a fishing line in the water and relax. Before you go, it would be very helpful to know where the fishing access points are around town, especially if you haven't been to some of them.

Visit http://data.seattle.gov to check it out for yourself.