Since its launch, I haven't spent much time on it, other than adding a few features such as color-coded map markers and ZIP code browsing.

I was looking for a side project to work on when I stumbled upon the Citizen ICAM site. That site is very useful, but I thought I could create a site that supplemented it by offering additional ways of sorting and searching the data.

From my limited experience looking at other such packages, ours is much less expensive and better software than the currently existing proprietary tools on the market. Also, it's based on open source technologies, which means there's no vendor lock-in.

Unfortunately the ICAM site doesn't provide an RSS feed or any other sort of data-export capability, so my program does screen scraping, which is essentially retrieving a Web page and programmatically 'reading' the page to grab the data.