From the Labs -- MetaCarta Labs Weblog

Last week at O’Reilly’s Where 2.0 2009, John Seratt and I had the pleasure of presenting the creative efforts of Chris Schmidt and Geoff Meek. These visual experiences display unstructured content in maps using MetaCarta’s Geographic Search and Referencing Platform (GSRP), which is the world’s largest georeferencing engine. The GSRP uses machine learning to recognize 100X more locations in unstructured content than anyone else.

The Recovery Map is a mashup that investigates map-based “story building.” It uses data related to the economic recovery as a starting point for exploring stories about people in different localities. The MetaCarta layer in this mashup uses news, blogs, and content from government web sites. The idea for Recovery Map came from a brainstorm with Brady Forest, the Chair of Where 2.0, and we have enjoyed using the “economic recovery” as a cartographic muse.

This content is also available in a geostream of news that animates a Silverlight application that illustrates the idea of an ambient experience in which the user can lean back to watch or pause the animation to dive into an area of interest.

To encourge exploration of the Recovery Map, we offered a prize: one ten-billionth of the ARRA stimulus package (i.e., $82) to the person who built the best layer after our presentation. The winning layer, titled Midnight Commander’s nightlife, is remarkable for several reasons. In addition to using a tiled layer showing alternative OSM styling, it also shows an artistic selection of night-time flickr photos and news related to night clubs in San Francisco. The creator is Jaak Laineste, a brilliant entrepreneur from Estonia. His company Nutiteq has produced MGMaps Lib SDK, which is the basis of many successful mobile applications.

By watching people use Recovery Map, we learned that map-based story building is both rewarding and intellectually challenging. Bringing cartography to the Web does not make it any easier to artfully select meaningful map-based presentations. If anything, it raises the bar by enabling easier access to a broader array of map-based information. These technologies allow a much wider community of people to create maps. One can imagine a transition point at which personal cartography becomes so easy that people start considering it as normal as writing a document in a word processor or building a spread sheet. What does it take to reach this transition point? Nobody can say for sure, but we believe a crucial component is the notion of story telling.

We hope to release re-usable “story telling” components of Recovery Map as enhancements to appropriate open source projects like OpenLayers or GeoExt. With luck, components like these will allow communities of non-map-geeks to participate in cartographic story telling.

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!

Last Friday, I was able to announce the official unveiling of Recovery Map, a new service for exploring the information about the recovery.

Over the past week, we’ve expanded a lot of the aspects of this service. Improvements to the MetaCarta search results let you more easily filter news stories from around the country. The MSER data, previously unattached to any other service, is now connected with the data from the Stimulus Watch project, with in-map visualization of popularity of projects.

In addition, we’ve expanded the storytelling capabilities of the map. Previously, you could only build a selection of layers. However, you now have the ability to *also* pull out particular projects, news articles, and more, and save the map with these available. This increases the story building opportunities of the application.

From the recovery effort in Salt Lake City, to Grand Forks Wind Power, you can now create a map that tells the story of recovery where you are.

To create a story in your map, simply click the ‘Save this’ link, which will create a draggable window that you can arrange in the map. Once you have the stories you want showing, simply click the ‘Save Configuration’ button, and you’ll have a new map URL that you can share with anyone, telling your story of the recovery.

The technology we’re using for this is nothing particularly fancy: some Django, some OpenLayers, and a couple different APIs. However, by combining the different data sources, you can quickly build a much more informative set of data, which shows information that is not possible to gain from a single map.

This is the power of tools like OpenLayers: they allow you to combine data from many sources in new and interesting ways. By combining news stories with economic stimulus data, you can see a more interesting view of both.

MetaCarta Labs is proud to announce the alpha availability of Recovery Map — a service designed towards allowing you to see the stimulus progress in your neighborhood.

Combine up to date news with stimulus recovery planning data
Using data from the Main Street Economic Recovery report, and integrating data from other sources such as MetaCarta’s GeoSearch News service, photos from Flickr, the ability to add your own KML layers, and more, recovery map is designed to allow you to dive deep into the economic stimulus, and understand what’s really going on in your neighborhood.Over the coming weeks, we’ll be expanding this to add support for more layers — including layers from the Map Rectifier and more — and improving all aspects of it. If you have a comment, feel free to let us know what you think is missing!

Two upcoming code sprints I’ll be attending:

NYC Open Mapping Sprint, hosted in part by OpenGeo. I’ll be there sprinting on OpenLayers.

OSGeo Toronto Code Sprint: Here helping to participate in the sprint, and demonstrate how its done based on other OpenLayers sprinting efforts thus far. I’m hoping to work with GDAL developers on some OSM related tasks, and to be dragging Schuyler with me.

One of the things that comes up most often when working with OSM is the lag time between editing and seeing your edits on the map. Especially for new users, the fact that the map can be out of date can be confusing — did my edits work, or not?

As part of the MetaCarta Labs effort to continue to help push the envelope in creating new OSM friendly tools, we have recently created the OSM “Up-to-Date” Bookmarklet. This bookmarklet allows you to quickly and easily see changes to your map area using the Mapnik rendering engine. Simply drag the bookmarklet to your browser toolbar, and you can click at any time to see your edits in almost-real time. (Edits are typically delayed by 5-10 minutes, as a result of the time delay for OpenStreetMap diffs.)

If you’re in the Boston area like us here at MetaCarta Labs, and interested in learning more about OSM and helping put your house on the map, you can attend the upcoming OpenStreetMap mapping party in Somerville, MA on Feb 14th and 15th. If you’ve ever had an interest in OSM, mapping parties are a great place to get started, no matter your experience level with OpenStreetMap prior to the event.

Heck, I might even dust off my GPS and join the fun.

I’m looking at various API references on the web, and curious as to whether people have favorite sites to go to for documentation for a service. Do you like how Google’s APIs Site is done? Or maybe you prefer Flickr’s more interactive developer tools?

I’m hoping to take the lessons from these sites and use them to help improve the design of the developers website. I’m told it’s a bit scary to non-developers at the moment, though I’m not sure that’s beyond the realm of expectation for a developers site. We’re scary people sometimes.

That said, I want to take the things that exist on other sites that people enjoy, and make them happen with the MetaCarta Developers site as well — so I’d love to hear any thoughts people have on creating a developer resource that’s both reasonably friendly and complete, and also useful.

Some examples I’ve come up with so far for comparison:

• Yahoo’s Developer Network
• Apple Developer Connection
• OpenCalais Web API
• Flickr API
• NPR API
• Twitter API
• Facebook Developers Site

Would love to hear of more, and your favorites.

New Developer Documentation website: MetaCarta Developers. This site has all kinds of information about the APIs and interfaces for MetaCarta’s products, so if you want to know more about how to use the OnDemand GeoTagger, you can go ahead and grab the OnDemand Web Services Guide as well as the MetaCarta Web Services guide, and see all the API information you could need, including information about how to authenticate, parameters to send in, etc.

Improving the documentation available for OnDemand has been on my todo list for a long time, and this is the first step in that direction. If you have any feedback about this setup, I’d love to hear it!

And of course, this isn’t just for OnDemand — as you’ll no doubt see when you explore the site, this content also applies to people developing against MetaCarta’s appliance products. In the future, we’ll be adding more to this site — like a gallery (a la the OpenLayers Gallery) and sharing more sample code and applications with you.

MetaCarta Labs is looking for a new employee again.

MetaCarta Labs is a small team of enthusiastic, fast paced developers working directly under the CTO to develop prototypes and new products and facilitate developer outreach. MetaCarta Labs is taking a key role in geo-enabling the Web — helping existing content owners to add geographic information to their content — and has a long history of working with external developer communities through open source projects and conferences.

I’ve been working at MetaCarta for two years, and I’ve really had a great time there. Some of the smartest people I know are my coworkers, and I’ve learned more working with them than I have anywhere else. I’ve travelled to conferences in other countries, met people from around the world, worked on several open source projects, and directly participated in a number of interesting revenue-building things within the company.

Interest in geo a must: experience in geo optional. We’re looking for a web hacker, primarily: interest and experience in HTML and JS is pretty much a prerequisite for what we’re looking for at the moment.

It’s a cool gig: if you know anyone who might be interested, feel free to send them our way: Contact information is available in the link above.

From the GeoJSON mailing list:

The GeoJSON Authors are proud to announce the finalization of the GeoJSON 1.0 Specification.

Representing more than a year’s worth of community discussion and development, the GeoJSON specification describes an easy to use, extensible format for transferring geographic data over the web. With support in more than 20 different applications, GeoJSON is already quickly becoming a de facto standard for transferring geographic data in a JSON format. The finalization of the spec represents the final step in formalizing the GeoJSON format for encoding this data.

More information on GeoJSON can be found at http://geojson.org/ , or from the GeoJSON mailing list at http://lists.geojson.org/listinfo.cgi/geojson-geojson.org .

FeatureServer and OpenLayers, two pieces of software originally created with MetaCarta Labs, are both heavy supporters of GeoJSON, and have been following the spec for more than a year now. It’s great to finally have this done and published as a ‘final’ 1.0 release.