I’m blogging live from latitude 37.6 degrees North, longitude 122.4 degrees West, or roughly a mile south of San Francisco airport, location of the fourth annual Where 2.0 conference on the geospatial web.

First up has been Adrian Holovaty, chief executive of EveryBlock. and the former online head of editorial innovation at the Washington Post. He created one of the first mash-ups with Google Maps at Chicagocrime.org, allowing people to see crime incidents in Chicago overlaid on Google Maps.

EveryBlock goes much further. As well as crime data, publicly available information from around 50 sources has been mashed down to be relevant to a single block in the cities of either Chicago, New York or San Francisco.

EveryBlock can pick up on street names in news stories and link them to blocks or whole areas if they are relevant. Flickr photos, Yelp reviews and lots of public information such as crime statistics, property records and restaurant health inspections are included.

The service reminds me of the UK site Upmystreet.com, but much has changed in the 10 years since its launch. Now the data sources are as likely to be user-generated content as official ones and the primary interface is the map rather than a text and postcode-based listing of local services and information.

John Hanke, director of Google Earth and Maps, told the conference there had been a 300 per cent increase in geotagged annotations on Google’s mapping services in the past year. More and more of it was rich media, he said, with links to photos and YouTube videos. He announced Google was opening up its API for any developer to grab and reuse any of the annotations.

He was joined on stage by Jack Dangermond, president and co-founder of ESRI, the leader in Geographic Information Systems. GIS is a set of intelligent maps that can overlay features such as sewage networks and weather conditions on standard maps.

Mr Hanke said the big challenge was to bring much of this data confined to the “dark web” into the public domain. The ESRI president, a surprise guest who is better known for shunning the limelight, sounded positively evangelical in his support for opening up these geo-databases. He said this would all become possible with ESRI’s ARCGIS 9.3 server software available in about four weeks.
The new product would allow agencies and governments to open up access to their data so it could be scraped and mashed-up by other sites.

One example showed how a map of last year’s fires in southern California could be further enriched with live data tracking the expected trajectory of the fire over a period of hours and road closures as they were implemented.

“With this kind of additional velocity, the best days of mapping and innovation on the Geoweb are ahead of us,” said Mr Hanke.

May 13th, 2008 in Internet | Permalink