PlanetEye

November 5th, 2008

Crowdsourcing GeoData

Juan Gonzalez

Vice President, Technology

Last week, Flickr announced the availability of shape data through their API. I had the opportunity to share the Where 2.0 podium with Dan & Aaron last May as they presented their progress in leveraging the millions of geotagged photos on Flickr.

The Significance of Geographical Information in Photos was an important milestone in explaining how meaningful geographical information was possible without using the services of sophisticated geo-providers. With the recent announcement, they’ve delivered a service that provides an alternative to expensive geographical boundary information.

Why is this important?

Building a service around geocoded data has become easier with the proliferation of mapping technology…..as long as all we do is display data on a map. If the service tries to do any calculations based on the geographical context, the maps are useless as they are nothing else but an image.

To really leverage the hundreds of thousands data points in our database to deliver great travel recommendations, we need to be able to answer questions such as “Is this hotel located in the city of Toronto?” or “What is the closest town with a good variety of restaurants?” or “Can I get a similarly-priced hotel closer to downtown?“.

Aside from some serious technology to manage large volumes of data, the key to solve these is what is known in the GIS world as shapefiles. While there are many sources for them, very few are available at low cost. Until now.

At PlanetEye, we’ve experimented with similar methods to the ones described by Flickr, and have seen very interesting results. For example, the following map shows the aggregate of all interactions with our map around the city of Toronto.

While we don’t have boundaries built into our application, from this aggregate it is possible to visualize approximately where the city borders with others around. And every time we add a new data point to our database, the picture gets better.

The only downside of this approach is that the boundary information is not accurate. Some cities may appear to be larger than they are only because we don’t have enough information on other cities in the vicinity. But it is safe to assume that as more people use our application, these deficiencies will be corrected.

If you’re interested in the future of the GeoWeb and have something to contribute, remember we have our GeoSocial meet-up tomorrow (November 6) at 6:30pm @ The Charlotte Room

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