WASHINGTON -- The Dallas information marketplace, which Microsoft said Monday will go live in the fourth quarter, will make available public and private information such as public health statistics and crime data.

Like iTunes, Dallas is an Internet marketplace, but for information instead of music.

Software developers can build apps based on the databases, and Microsoft is integrating the information databases into software such as Excel, SharePoint, Bing Maps, PowerPivot and Visual Studio, will remain free on Dallas.

Private companies have also made data available for software makers to build on, such as the Associated Press' news database, the National Geographic's database of hiking trails, the Lexis Nexis media database and the Wolfram Alpha search database. Information providers can choose to syndicate and charge for use of the information.

More than 3,000 developers have set up accounts on Dallas to build applications that can run on the iPhone, iPad, Silverlight on the PC or on the Web. Apps that use the information will be listed in the Dallas marketplace as well.

"As a developer, you [will] have all of this reach," said Moe Khosravy, group manager of Dallas.

For instance, Seattle company Tableau has syndicated content from the Dallas marketplace so that its customers can use the data to build data visualizations on Tableau software. In this screenshot Microsoft showed during its Monday keynote, a visualization combines UNESCO data with a heat map.

From Pri0