Geonomy Interview

Geonomy is an interesting new website, specializing in geo-tagging anything and everything, particularly anything Wikipedia related. Since its launch, the website has raked in visitors, and I went to find out some more.

Geonomy is very useful in many respects. Its aim is to provide an easier going style wikipedia, where everything, rather than just being plain old info, has a geo-tag too. You can search articles by location, or by a random tag, and the service is a really effective way of finding out lots of information, but in addition, the ability to pinpoint it down to a specific location on a map.

Below each map generated, that is pin pointed with relevant, tagged locations, information will appear from Wikipedia, in relation to each tagged place. Whether it be ‘capital cities’, ‘olympic games host cities’, ‘cities with a population over 1,000,000′, or whatever the random tag may be, the website shows accurate, useful, and relevant information. It’s a great time waster, brain filler and fact finder, all in one place. The ‘random tag’ button is also strangely addictive. Finding random facts about random places and random things that happened there has a kind of odd, magical allure and appeal.

The search that the site has is also very efficiently designed. It looks for the keywords that you’ve specified, in the ‘place name, summary text and tags. Any matching places will then be shown on the map as the triangles’. These triangles are all color coded, so you know who has submitted them, how much information they have, or where the info has come from. ‘Yellow triangles represent Wikipedia pages, red triangles are place markers that tend to have less information, purple trianges are used to denote places that have been added by Geonomy users.’

I also managed to have a chat with co-founder of the website, Scott, and we had a nice little talk. I think that you’ll be interested in the things he has to say. It was all very relaxed, not like a proper interview or anything. It kind of reflects Geonomy as a whole. A very laid back, effective website.

Hey Scott! So you’re the co-founder of Geonomy. In your own words, what is Geonomy? Also, what are the people behind it like? Behind the scenes etc, anything that might interest the readers of Profy.com.

Geonomy is a collaboration between myself and my good friend Ben Lewis. Ben is a Project Manager at a GIS company where he designs and builds GIS systems for government agencies. Ben is very interested in using the collaborative power of the web to build tools that empower ordinary people. A few years ago he built the first peer-to-peer GIS, a system which allows anyone to serve spatial data to anyone. He also maintains a master list of Open Source GIS projects at http://www.opensourcegis.org.

I am a software consultant who has been working mainly in the transportation industry for the past 12 years. Working on transportation related systems is very interesting (and challenging) work that consists mostly of writing command and control systems that are owned and operated by government agencies. My most visible work has been on a Maryland statewide traffic control system that I have been working on since 1999.

We noticed that there was a lot of amazing GIS related information out there, and that the information was being plotted on maps for various purposes, but nobody was really tying it all together. Geonomy started as our attempt to bring together this existing information and allow users to view it spatially.

A great example of this can be seen by searching Geonomy for hiking trails then zooming to an area with markers and turning on the USGS Topographic Maps overlay. Knowing where the trails are is great, but seeing them plotted on a USGS topographic map takes it to another level. Add to that the ability to find myriad other places in the same area (airports for example) and you have something very powerful.

Early on we decided that we wanted users to be able to create custom views of the information in Geonomy. To accomplish that we allow users to tag the places in our database, search for all points with any particular tag, and save any map view as a permalink. As an example, a user could tag some places they want to show to a friend with a tag like “Scott’s Places”, pan and zoom the map until it shows those places, then create a link and send it via email. Their friend will then see the Geonomy map with only the tagged locations visible.

To me, though, the most compelling feature of the system is that we allow users to add places themselves. For example, I review wines as a hobby. I recently decided to create a virtual wine tour within Geonomy. So, I found the address of each vineyard on the web and used the “Locate” function in Geonomy to find the correct map location. I then clicked on the map and chose to “Add a Point” at the clicked location, provided a place name, summary and a URL that linked back to my review of the wine from that vineyard. Finally, I tagged each of these new places with “GrapeScott” which is the name of my wine blog.

I essentially created a Google map mashup without having to write code, host a web site, etc. To me this is where Geonomy is truly revolutionary.

How did you get into mashups, and how many other Web 2.0 projects have you worked on?

I first encountered AJAX during my consulting work in transportation. My first experience of a mashup. I was hired to create a system that allows users to control traffic cameras via a web-based user interface. Users needed immediate feedback when panning, tilting and zooming the remote camera. I found that AJAX was far better suited to this task than the other mechanisms I had been using previously.

I got into Google Maps a bit later when Ben approached me about creating Geonomy. I decided that I would need to do something much smaller scale first, in order to get familiar with the Google Maps API. To that end, I created a site called RoadSummit.com that plotted out traffic and transit related systems in various cities on a Google map. A user could click on a map marker and see what types of information were available for that city including images from traffic cameras, current messages on roadside signs, current accident and delay information, etc. I am now in the process of adding those links into Geonomy and tagging all of the places where they exist with “Traffic”. Needless to say, RoadSummit.com is no longer necessary.

I have now been using AJAX on all of my transportation related consulting endeavors for the past two years. Additionally, I created the aforementioned RoadSummit.com and a web site called StadiumNavigator.com that plotted all NFL and some NCAA football stadiums on a Google map. Some of these stadiums are available in Geonomy and those that aren’t will surely be added soon, so I have brought that site down as well.

Additionally, during one of my consulting endeavors I created a map using an exciting open-source product called Ka-Map!. This is a PHP based tool that works with UMN MapServer to allow users to provide Google Maps type functionality for custom map data that is housed on their own server.

What do you, at Geonomy believe the future of Web 2.0 is, and how will you adapt to it?

I think that the future is likely to bring even greater usability and convenience to end users. The amount of information on any given topic is growing at such a rapid rate that it seems likely to me the future will have to include allowing users to find the information that they are looking for more quickly and bringing that information together with related information from other sites and services more easily.

I think that the geo-spatial aspect of the web is still largely unexplored. Finding data not only based on its textual content, but on its physical location relative to the user performing the search looks very promising to me. That is one reason why I am so excited about Geonomy.

To me Web 2.0 means providing users with the usability they grew accustomed to during the fat client days, with the advantages and convenience of web based applications. Key among these are the ability to access your application from any “connected” computer, and the ability for those applications to easily access the wealth of information available from other online services.