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!