During our trip to China in December Corrie and I definitely felt the effects of the poor air quality. This has also been the discussion for over a year leading up to the Beijing Olympics that start tomorrow. China has been trying a variety of mechanisms to cut down on pollution including removing all cars from the roads for 2 weeks and seeding rain clouds to pull the particulates out of the air.

The Olympics are finally here and the question still remains about the air quality and it’s effect on the athletes. One even wonders what the availability of this data is on the ground there. So to help out, I built a Mapufacture map that pulls the daily data reports from the Beijing Municipal Environmental Protection Bureau. You can also get the GeoRSS and KML.

As part of the new partnership we’re looking at the combination of geospatial data with dynamic information and brought in the Olympic venues as additional map layer.

Thanks to Corrie for the environmental analysis.

View the Beijing Air Quality during the Olympics map.

I’m incredibly thrilled to share the news that Mapufacture, my company co-founded with Mikel, will be joining FortiusOne. Mikel, and Seanshare their thoughts on BrainOff and the GeoCommons blog and here is the official press release.

Building Mapufacture has been an incredible experience. What started out as a project to demonstrate an index of a new format called GeoRSS grew into a company that effectively demonstrated geospatial aggregation and provided free mapping tools to organizations and individuals around the world.

Being an entrepreneur means there is no definition of evenings, weekends or holidays. As a small company, everyone is responsible for development, management, accounting, business, public relations, server maintenance and more. It’s exhilarating and exhausting. Over the past several years, Mikel and I have been proponents of open data and services, and saw the GeoWeb become a complex, and fast-paced domain.

The evolution of Mapufacture

Joining FortiusOne means we now have the support of a larger company and infrastructure to better support and build these ideas. The GeoCommons team is stellar - we have been working closely with them this year on a variety of projects such as interoperability testbeds, geodata federation, lightweight metadata standards, and KML standardization.

Mapufacture + FortiusOne

As Sean talked about in his post, GeoCommons has been approaching a different aspect of the GeoWeb. GeoCommons Finder! is a powerful infrastructure for hosting and utilizing large, complex geodata sets. By contrast, Mapufacture is focused on tying into the dynamic geoweb of syndicated data and web services. We’ve built adapters to many social and map making sites, as well as generally gathering up the available GeoRSS and KML that has been emerging and providing interfaces to find, visualize, and access these in a variety of formats. The goal is to allow utilization of personalized data sets produced by any other toolset.

Together the complex, but widely used large data sets, combined with the varied and dynamic feeds provides users with complete flexibility in using geospatial visualization and analysis to address whatever situation is important to them. The data continues to be free, so users are able to find, combine, and save this data for use in other appropriate applications. Joining together Mapufacture and FortiusOne will incredibly accelerate the realization of this concept.

We fully appreciate all the help our supporters have provided over the years - and believe that now is an incredibly exciting time for Where2.0.

“Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning.”
- Benjamin Franklin

This is a cross-post from the Mapufacture Blog, but I wanted to point out an article published in Business Week: Making Maps Work When Disaster Strikes that discusses the role of collaborative mapping in emergency response situations. In particular it highlights the work of GeoCommons, OpenStreetMap, and Mapufacture, open geodata, and easy to use tools. Read the Mapufacture post for more thoughts on the article.

There is quite an underlying question here about the importance of both crowd-sourcing as well as curated, or expert data and tools. I believe moving forward there will be a lot of effort mixing the differences as well as applications that allow for the proper use and understanding of the data and published maps.

One minor point that is disappointing about Business Week’s site is the lack of external links to the organizations or tools. The only links are to Business Week’s own internal listing for businesses. In fact, besides the Digg & del.icio.us taggings, I don’t think there is a single link on the article’s page that isn’t either an internal link to Business Week, or through one of their advertisements.

Two months ago I talked about working with Alan from Think NOLA to provide tools and technologies for bringing together the quickly growing user-generated datasets, collaborative mapping, and historic information towards advocacy, awareness, and planning in rebuilding the neighborhoods of New Orleans.

What has been most amazing about the project is that there were emergent, self-induced projects that were actively addressing many areas of capturing information. They are using Flickr for geotagged photos of historic buildings, spreadsheets of demolition permits exported as KML, and key historic maps that outline the original city planning.

The project was selected as a finalist in the NetSquared challenge, which means they were given the opportunity to come out to San Jose to meet with the other 20 projects and discuss their ideas, goals, progress, and cooperations. While the conference itself will award three top-voted projects with funding, the point of the conference and discussion isn’t solely this monetary support.

In planning for the conference, the entire discussion occurred publicly on Alan’s Blog at http://thinknola.com/post/gis. Through open discussion, numerous other projects and individuals contacted Alan to share support, data sets, ideas and future collaborations. NetSquared served as a catalyst for focusing a specific set of projects, but the longer effect is that it has brought together people that will carry the project forward and make sure everyone succeeds.

As a prototype, I used Mapufacture to combine together Francine’s Flickr photos, planning documents of school rebuilding, and the 1924 Taylor’s planning map of New Orleans. It is just a simple demonstration of what is possible using a combination of Neogeography, GIS, and community participation. The next step will be to build better tools for basic analysis and discussion. In addition, the data is open and available for other people to download for their own visualizations, analysis and collaborations.

Prototype: http://mapsomething.com/demo/neworleans

If you haven’t already heard, there are only a couple more days (Monday, March 24, 2008) to vote for the The NetSquared Mashup projects. NetSquared sponsors ‘mashups’ that promote and enable social change. This can apply to a very wide variety of projects, from awareness to funding aid. It’s incredibly easy to vote, and the top 20 voted projects of the 120+ submissions will go to the NetSquared conference in May to pitch their project for additional resources and also engage closer to the rest of the community.

When you register, you have to vote for at least 5 projects (to make sure people don’t just vote for their one personal favorite, but actually investigate other projects), and you can vote for up to 10 different projects.

I’ve personally been working with Alan Gutierrez of Think New Orleans on his incredible work in bringing awareness, and a stop to, the improper demolition of houses after Katrina. He is digitizing City Buiding permits, demolition plans, notifications, and incentive options to help citizens protect and rebuild their homes. He runs GIS coworking at Trinity church to educate local citizens on the use of GIS software for doing a lot of the heavy lifting - and we’ve been working with him to help bring all this together into the web to share and utilize by a broader community.

You can check out that project here: City of New Orleans: A Mashup for Citizen Monitoring of the Recovery

Another great project is Ushahidi: Mapping Reports of Post-Election Violence in Kenya - where they’ve built a preliminary site to accept user-contributed information on violence outbreaks.

The projects are addressing real world issues with real solutions - so far they have had success on their own and are making a difference. Independently the projects will still be successful and important and their success will only be improved upon by support of the NetSquared community.

It can be daunting to hunt through the rest of the projects. It reminds me of going through conference submissions - I would recommend going through topical areas such as “Health”, “Community Improvement”, “Arts”, etc. to make it easier to compare all the great ideas and potentials.

Remember, voting is only open until this Monday, March 24, 2008 - so please register and vote!