This is simply what geospatial Web services are about IMHO. Let me quote John Kim from the Mass. DOE:

Hi everyone,

We just launched our first set of thematic maps yesterday on our
State’s Special Ed data. Please check it out if you have a chance.

Here is an example using Boston -
http://profiles.doe.mass.edu/home.aspx?orgcode=00350000&view=sped#

As an FYI, we used MassGIS’ GeoServer to make our WMS and WFS
requests.

The DOE is publishing education statistics in table and map form on a web page. Pretty standard so far. But clicking a town on the map zooms to that town and changes the caption of the map to display the graduation rate for that town! I’d guess that the map clicking and zooming is via a WMS interface, and the caption change uses the WFS interface (but that could be leveraging the WMS too via the GetFeatureInfo operation).
I used to consult to MassGIS in the 90s, and it’s nice to see the vision we were advocating about the integration of web services across government agencies bearing fruit. MassGIS has done a ton of great service-oriented work over the years and has won many awards for it. I hope this application gets the recognition it deserves.

I updated my Cambridge events geoblog recently. This is a thingy that reads the event listings on Cambridge’s official city web site,
and reformats it into a blog feed. In the process it also attempts to
figure out where the event is happening so you can map it all.

Here’s the raw “geoblog” feed for the last week, and here’s a map
of those events. Please feel free to play with this data stream and
build cool stuff with it. I’d love to see someone build a phone app
that would tell someone what events are going on within a mile of their
location.