I remember being impressed by Platial and the goal of providing a way for anyone to easily annotate places that mattered to them.When I originally pitched the idea of a “Neogeography” book to O’Reilly it was with the inspiration of Di-Ann’s drive to citizen access to geospatial tools that I considered how people should be able to map their genealogy and share their trips.

As Mikel and I built Mapufacture, we partnered with Platial on several projects. Platial had attempted to make a local information aggregator that never really took off, and so we discussed how to utilize the geospatial data aggregation platform in Mapufacture to provide and aggregate content for Platial. I even helped build and test the Platial developer API using the first iterations of AtomPub and OpenSearch, the results of which can now be seen in Mapufacture’s and GeoCommons’ APIs.

In looking at specifically the GeoWeb landscape, Platial definitely provided a necessary capability of easily allowing people to annotate and share locations. It is the more explicit version of more recent location-sharing tools such as FourSquare, BrightKite, or Latitude that merely ask where you are, not what’s important to you. When Mapufacture was acquired by FortiusOne, the combination of the large head of geographic data in GeoCommons, combined with the very long-tail of aggregated sensor and streaming information provided for mixing disparate datasources and understanding of context and relevance. Users want to collaborate around all types of data, and share insights, find out relevant information, share this with friends, family, coworkers, and their government.

Clearly geographic data is not merely limited to traditional map sources or cartographic outputs. Location is being integrated across all platforms and recognized as a primary component of any data. What differs is the means by which users will interact, create, and use this information depending on their needs, context, and capabilities.

As has been widely reported by the news, GeoCommons is archiving the Platial user data and maps. Users can find their data by visiting the GeoCommons Platial Source page and searching for their username or maps and freely download them or build new maps and widgets. Along the way, perhaps users will also realize the capability of combining their personal information with relevant geographic data – because for example, you should know great surfing spots combined with wave heights and approved recreation areas.

Where to Surf? View full map

Di-Ann, Chris, Jason, Jake, and the rest of the tremendous Platial team have provided an amazing lead in the future of user contributed mapping – and while Platial itself is currently on hiatus, we’re excited that GeoCommons can provide a role in continuing open access to Platial users’ data and easy to use tools for them to visualize, analyze, and share their experiences and insights.

The GeoCommons team is expanding and we’re looking for some cutting-edge developers and designers to join us. We’re using a wide range of technologies to build an easy-to-use and incredibly powerful geodata sharing, visualization, and collaboration platform that is being used in organizations from the government, to enterprise, to international NGO’s, to local communities and groups.

With GeoCommons, we’re integrating Neogeography with GIS to provide powerful tools to users: if you can make it fun on the web where users aren’t required to stay, then customers will love you. And by integrating with other tools that each user is comfortable with, whether it is Excel, Notepad, GoogleEarth, or ArcGIS Desktop and QGIS; we help bring GeoCommons to them rather than making them come to GeoCommons. We’re also pushing the next generation of GeoWeb standards: KML, GeoRSS, GeoJSON, and making them more powerful and supported. These are ideas we started with Mapufacture and are quickly integrating with Finder!, Maker! and the rest of the GeoCommons suite.

As a part of our team, you would investigate large-scale data sharing and linking, geospatial and data visualization mechanisms and tool development, web native API integration and community building. We’re working with many other groups in the open-source as well as GIS communities to help integrate data and tools to broadly disseminate all this quality data that has otherwise been inaccessible and make it easy to visualize and use in decision-making.

We’re looking for developers with real programming chops – you should be comfortable considering Mongrel and Nginx versus Passenger, know when to use unobtrusive Javascript or call ActionScript Flash hooks, have played with ActiveMQ and Stomp, beanstalkd, Starling or other queueing systems, read technology news and blogs and preferably have a site yourself where you share your experiences and code with the world. We’re looking for community members and developers that like working in teams, attending programming groups, and are comfortable sharing their ideas. We encourage you to have hobbies and side projects – we’ve built quite a few ‘lab’ tools ourselves such as context-free music and touchscreen whiteboards. And you don’t have to be an Apple user, but it helps.

Welcome to Washington, DC

FortiusOne is located in Arlington, VA – directly above the Courthouse Metro on the Orange line into DC, and a short walk into the district directly. The DC area is on an incredible spike of growing technology community. Where else can you live in a “metro area” that encompasses at least 3 states, all of which are metro accessible? The area is also renowned for it’s bike accessibility. The recent election has cast a spotlight on the future of technology in the government with President-Elect Obama’s Change.gov initiative. The upcoming inauguration is sure to be an incredibly historic event and you could be here to help map it.

As for the community, there are at least three Ruby-specific groups, a NOVALang where learning new programming languages is the prime objective, RefreshDC, TwinTech, and one of the most open governments to geodata standards and sharing. We’re also quite big fans of the local beer selection and hard to beat the food variety.

Let us know

So if this sounds exciting to you, and you’re interested in joining the team – please let us know! You can also check out the formal listing.

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.

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

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.

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

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!

The project is Mapufacture. You can subscribe to feeds, create maps as collections of feeds, and share maps with other users. It’s still in very active development (one could call it beta, but I won’t), but is usable. Guilhem Vellut is the person responsible for the very nice mapping via YM4R_Mapstraction library. If you’d like to give it a try and give feedback that would be great.

Here are some examples of useful maps created with Mapufacture:

• WiFi in Grand Rapids from James Stewart
• Finnish Rescue Services’ 100 Lates Events