Need to add hyperlocalization to your mashup/site/app? Users searching for “Pizza in Dogpatch” and your geocoder just falls over? Well, Urban Mapping pulled a some what surprising, and incredibly great move today and announced they are opening up the API to their neighborhood database.

If you haven’t heard before, Urban Mapping provides the data to most of the major mapping users on defining areas like “Little Italy”, or “Soho”. This includes Google, MapQuest, and others. By opening their API, third-party developers can now build this type of capability into their own applications. It’s something we’ll definitely be adding to Mapufacture very soon.

There are numerous other geocoders out there, not least of which is the excellent and open GeoNames. However, an API for looking up ambiguous, and changing local definitions of a neighborhood has been missing. UMI fills that by providing multiple mechanisms for finding and defining ‘hoods. For example, you can look up the neighborhoods at a location, by name, or even get the exonyms of a neighborhood, depending on the language. There are a number of other methods and demos available. Check out the very good
documentation that links to each of the demos and even includes code snippets in Ruby and PHP for how to call the API.

As Brady points out on O’Reilly Radar, the API is using SOAP, and not REST. The API was developed just as REST was “becoming all the rage”, but had various reasons for being SOAP based. Still, the code examples show how easy it is to use a SOAP library to create a simple wrapper around the API. [via Brian Suda]

Of course, I’m perhaps a little biased on the Urban Mapping demos and documentation – considering I helped developed them. Urban Mapping is a great company to work with and I’m really looking forward to their continued expansion of their data products and APIs.

Check out my post on GeoRSS Metadata over at the GeoRSS blog. Looking for some feedback and ideas on how to use the featuretypetag and relationshiptag elements of a GeoRSS entry. We’d like to put something into GeoPress to support them, but need to know what users would expect and want to use to refer to locations and tag them.

activeCollab is an easy to use, web based, open source collaboration and project management tool. It’s BaseCamp, but free of charge and open-source. And I actually possess all of my own data.

Setup took a whopping 10 minutes (including waiting for the DNS of the MySQL database to propagate, and adding some accounts). You can setup projects, add users, limit users to specific projects, and add clients. It even looks really great, which is entirely not-normal for an Open-Source project, which is usually very innovative/solid, but looks like old white toast.

I don’t think it supports the nice API’s and such that BaseCamp does, but it’s an actively developed project, so hopefully it shows up soon.

I’ve been rather incommunicado for awhile. I’ve been very busy with several projects, all of which are due in the short-term and I can talk about after they’re done.

Let’s just give a few teasers:

1. It’s compact, re(a)d, and has a tail.
2. Where, oh where, has the local coffee shop gone?
3. Don’t be late!

I’m also busy with wedding planning and honeymoon arrangements. I will, of course, be tracking our excursions in the GeoPress demo blog, which also happens to be my current travelog. Of course, my friends & family also dragged me off for a weekend of fun in Boston (there was some work too). I highly recommend the

.

I talked a little while ago about the enlightening insight of understanding more about how the next phase of Applications will be “desktop-deployed web applications”. This was inspired/aided by listening to the brilliance of people like Matt Webb. Using standardized, hopefully cross-platform technologies, it’s possible to develop your application once, and “push” it to any number of devices.

Ajaxian discusses Adobe’s new “Apollo”:

Apollo is client-based software that will run Flash applications separately from a browser, whether online or offline

The image shows an example travel application developed in Flash, and deployed to a desktop via Apollo. (via Digital Backcountry)

I also saw that Chris Messina is helping out on a project WebKit on Rails, whose goal is to make it easier to deploy Apple’s WebKit and also to “come up with new ideas and practices that leverage the WebKit platform”. WebKit is an excellent platform to develop desktop web apps, as it can be baked straight into a Cocoa application, but be accessing a “web application” that may be running locally on the users’ machine.

rails-app-installer allows you to bundle and install/uninstall a Rails application, including required gems.

$ gem install my_app
$ my_app install /some/path