WhereWeek Developments

[David Troy]

Hey Folks,

To say that last week was a blur is to employ understatement at its finest.

There is a lot that came out of Where 2.0 and Wherecamp that directly affects this discussion and I've been doing my best to digest it all.  Here are some of the highlights:

Google

REST-based API for GeoSearch (http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxsearch/documentation/#fonje)

Flash API for Maps

Feature/Layer Enhancements to Google Maps (Real Estate, Photos, Wikipedia, et al)

Google Friend Connect

Yahoo

Yahoo Internet Location Platform (http://developer.yahoo.net/geo)

Placebase/Pushpin

Free REST-based API for US place data, including some interesting demographic info

http://www.pushpin.com/api/docs/rest/

This could be the basis of some really interesting mashups;  a Twitter Caste Map, anyone?? :)

Skyhook/Loki

Announced locationaware.org, an initiative to try to get a Javascript-based standard for location-detection capability in the browser.  This is an important part of the location puzzle and the personal project of Ryan Sarver at Skyhook.

These are the things which most stood out to me.  If anyone has any other things that I've missed which contribute significantly, please say so.

The Google REST API is particularly significant, and I'd like to see what people's experience is using this for various kinds of geosearch.

Also, it turns out that Google is employing the GeoHash algorithm I've been pushing to do spatial searching using BigTable.  Since database schemes like BigTable don't support traditional GIS extensions/spatial indexes, GeoHash allows for a simple bounding box search using truncated GeoHash substrings.  I will post separately about this shortly, as I am working on some GeoHash tools to expand this functionality.  This is of particular interest to AppEngine developers.

Shaoib Burq and I are working on a YILP (Yahoo Internet Location Platform) gem for Ruby which should be available in the next couple of days.  This is a nice geocoding platform from Yahoo that expands on their "Where On Earth" platform.  Every location on earth has a unique WOEID, which is a nice, hierarchical way of dealing with locations and neighbor relationships.  We'll announce this gem soon but in the meantime you can check out the api.

More in a moment.  Now that the Where Week is over some of our other members should have some time to pitch into the conversation as well.

Dave