Talk at Urban Mapping
Posted: April 28th, 2007 | 2 Comments »Ian White was kind enough to invite me present my research at today’s Urban Mapping brown bag seminar.
Thanks for the gig, Ian! It is extremely valuable to get insights from people in the field doing real business with geodata. Subsequent to my presentation we discussed the current state of local search and the difficulties to integrate a user-centered perspective. In the generation of their neighborhood datasets, Urban Mapping creates on purpose overlapping areas. However this fuzziness is appreciated by the engineers who have to integrate these types of data in their search engines. In addition, local search engines have been forcing users to search for location-based information by providing an area. Even if need types of queries are available, it is very difficult to make users learn to query based on monument rather than area (what is close to the Empire State Building?).
[...] invested a large amount of energy and money in obtaining neighborood expertise. Companies such as Urban Mapping sells its extensive user-centered neighborhood datasets to major search engines. New approaches [...]
[...] Urban Mapping, a provider of geospatial data and services released today an API to access its Urbanware Neighborhood database and computation logic for neighborhoods, other informally-defined regions and transit systems. This service include neighborhoods located at a point/location, neighborhoods within a city or bounding box, alternative neighborhood names, relationships with other neighborhoods (nesting, aliases, dominance), multi-lingual support, intersecting postal codes and intersecting municipalities. [...]