More Thoughts on Recovery Map
Thus far, I haven’t really gone into a lot of the idea behind Recovery Map, and why we’re doing it here at MetaCarta Labs.
One of the key things that MetaCarta helps to do is to find information and trends that are written in text, but only visible or apparent when actually seen in a map. The combination of GeoTagging — taking unstructured text, and extracting the geographic information from it — and our search engine — allowing you to search millions of documents based on keywords *and* geography — allow you to quickly find patterns in text that would not be apparent in any other way.
Although this is useful in and of itself, it is most often seen in cases where you have some other source of data you’re combining it with. By directing your search around, for example, wind power stimulus projects, you can direct your geographic search quickly. Once you’re there, you can use content from news wires, blogs, government websites, and more, to explore the discourse around a given project — learning the context, the discussions, and the emotions.
The Stimulus Watch project serves to do this by centralizing the discussion: get everyone to discuss things in the same place, and everyone will learn from each other. MetaCarta’s search technology lets you find the discourse that’s happening across the web — beyond Stimulus Watch, beyond AP, and into local town newspapers, from places like the Mesabi Daily News, talking about Minnesota Power’s plans to build a power plant in North Dakota.
By combining different data sources, you can really begin to see the full picture around the economic stimulus. Whether it’s a comparison of Schools losing out on funding to road construction projects, or simply a finding of local events surrounding the stimulus project — pro or con — using the web as a source of information, and geography as a filter, lets you really begin to understand what the stimulus is about at the human level, rather than at the spreadsheet level.
It has always been the belief of MetaCarta that when more people use maps, more people will find interesting data in the maps. MetaCarta provides a very useful way to find the unstructure information — a way to Find Everything Written About Any Place. This use case fits across a wide range of uses. MetaCarta is a step towards helping people find the information they really want — the text, and stories, that they’re interested in seeing most.
Recovery Map provides tools to really understand the Economic Stimulus. Using MetaCarta search as a layer to provide background discourse, the Mainstreet Economic Recovery data to provide a location to center discussions around, and adding in support for KML and other map data, you can really begin to understand what the stimulus is all about — and that’s just one more great thing that you can do with a good map.
Recovery Map will be presented by John Frank and John Seratt at Where 2.0 in San Jose, CA, at 3:00 PM. They’ll be announcing a contest at that time related to Recovery Map, so I highly recommend attending!