Lessons learned while taking a geocentric mashup to being a business

Why should you care?

Web2.0

Why should you care?

Are complex GIS products needed to build a geocommunity?

Numbers:

500,000 UK homes

219,000 unique UK users*

10+ types of geodata

2 countries

8 employees

approx. £5,000 amount spent on GIS

* Comscore July 2007

Challenges:

• geocoding

• understanding user intent

• merging diverse geodata

• internationalisation

• open API

Geocoding:

• free text to longitude, latitude

• 10 Poland Street, W1F 7NJ to 51.512438, -0.133619

• 100,000s transactions/day (10,000/min peak)

• multiple countries

Free Trade Wharf, 340 The Highway, Wapping/Limehouse London

Fountain Road (Flat 2), Edgbaston, UK

15, ASTLEY HOUSE, LONDON

Albert Villas, Gilbert Mews, LEIGHTON BUZZARD, Bedfordshire, LU7 1NF

Lake Lock Drive, Wakefield West Yorkshire

Church Lane, London

UK postcodes

(((^[BEGLMNS][1-9]\d?) | (^W[2-9] ) | ( ^( A[BL] | B[ABDHLNRST] |C[ABFHMORTVW] | D[ADEGHLNTY] | E[HNX] | F[KY] | G[LUY] | H[ADGPRSUX] |I[GMPV] | JE | K[ATWY] | L[ADELNSU] | M[EKL] | N[EGNPRW] | O[LX] |P[AEHLOR] | R[GHM] | S[AEGKL-PRSTWY] | T[ADFNQRSW] | UB | W[ADFNRSV] |YO | ZE ) \d\d?) | (^W1[A-HJKSTUW0-9]) | (( (^WC[1-2]) | (^EC[1-4]) |(^SW1) ) [ABEHMNPRVWXY] ) ) (\s*)? ([0-9][ABD-HJLNP-UW-Z]{2}))

housenumbers

\b(\d+[\-\/]?\d*[\-]?[A-F]*[\-\/]?\w*)\b

• about 800k streets, 350k unique names in UK• 1341x High Street• 1319x Station Road• 1015x Church Street

• 140 abbreviations• Av, Dr, Rd, Sq, Pl, Pk ...

• cleansing, typos, spacing, utf8, house numbers ...

User intent

I want to live “near “ Central London

I want to live “near “ Soho

I want to live “near “ Speyton

‘Waterloo’

• five different Waterloos in the UK

‘Rushton’

• three different Rushtons in the UK

Merging diverse geodata

MP constituencies

no correlation to boroughs/postcodes/anything

Photos of every OS grid

no correlation to boroughs/postcodes/anything

Internationalis(z)ation

Major differences:• base data

RoyalMail vs. Tele Atlas

• character set

• different scales UK postcode is not the same as an ES postcode

• market differences‘The flat is in central Madrid’

Exposing geodata

Google mapplet

Facebook Application

Widgets

Literally cut and paste

Open Formats• GeoRSS

• API You can have our data

• Sharing is good!Yahoo Pipes, Facebook Platform …

Why should you care?

It’s very possible to build a geocommunity without GIS

Is the professional GIScommunity relevant?

Points to consider:• Openness wins

• You can’t compete with free

• Data is becoming a commodity. Rapidly

What to do?• Communicate more

• Free your data

• Engage with innovators, don’t fight them

Questions/Discussion

Other interesting things I haven’t mentioned

• Text analysis/cleansing

• Detecting duplicates

Learn more:http://blog.nestoria.co.uk

Thanksedf@lokku.com