About the Author:  Sean Gorman founded FortiusOne in 2005 to bring location based analytics to the mass market. Sean brings over 10 years of experience at the forefront of the geospatial revolution as a researcher, practitioner, and entrepreneur at FortiusOne. Through both academic and entreprenurial efforts he has been working to make geographic data more accessible to the public since 1997 culminating in the creation of GeoCommons – a crowd-sourced repository of statistical data and social feeds that can be easily mapped, remixed and reused by non-technical users. Sean has been featured in media such as, Wired, Der Spiegel, ABC, Washington Post, Business 2.0, MSNBC, CBS and CNN. He also holds a PhD. From George Mason University in Public Policy where he was the Provost’s High Potential Scholar and was the recipient of the Fischer Prize. He has published dozens of articles on geographic data sharing and analysis, and authored the book Networks, Complexity and Security: The Role of Public Policy in Critical Infrastructure Protection. Read more from this author

It has been an interesting week with an article in the Washington Post and InformationWeek on the launch of GeoIQ and the upcoming data repository. Thought I‘d take some time to go into more detail with what we have in mind combing the two into the foundation of a geospatial software as a service. GeoIQ is the first step – allowing non technical users to analyze their data to make better location based decisions. In order to make better decisions you need good data, and this is where the data repository comes in.

Data is a problem that is not exclusive to us, but something that is critical to growth of web mapping in total. O’Reily, through Where 2.0, has given this topic considerable attention and we are hoping we can add our small bit to the solution. My frustration with geospatial data goes back almost a decade when we first started looking for open source data. Back then it was the beginning of the .com boom and we were looking for spatial data on fiber optic infrastructure to see if we could sort out if the Internet was going to be the end of geography. At the time the pundits were saying that the Internet would mean location was no longer important because you would be able to connect to the Internet and work from anywhere. So, we were mapping where the nuts and bolts of the Internet to see what locations could support the new business of the Internet and if the geography was actually changing.

This seemed like a cool and straight forward idea at the time, but as we started going through all the different forms people were collecting maps of their fiber routes it started getting uglier and uglier. The frustrating array of different formats, projections, and data attributes was just the tip of the iceberg. We eventually sorted it all out and got a reasonable database going, but it was a long slog. With the advent of Google and other search engines it became easier to find different locations data was stored, but it was always a pain in the arse to turn it into something we could use for actual research and analysis.

When FortiusOne started we were doing homeland security work and got tasked with emergency response work after the London bombings and Hurricane Katrina. Both times we received a call on Friday night and needed to deliver analysis for Monday morning briefings. We burned the midnight oil and got the job done, but realized there was something inherently wrong with the effort. The analysis needed to be delivered in seconds not days if it was going to truly make a difference in a crisis and anyone should be able to perform it – no PhD. required. To do that we were determined we needed to be able to deliver our analysis through a web browser and not using the desktop applications that took hours to run analyses. This was the advent of GeoIQ.

GeoIQ was only half a solution though because we spent half of our 48 hour response trying to find the right data, download it, clean it, attribute it, verify it etc etc. We started off building an internal system to help ourselves out. The system allowed all our data to be easily found with a simple tagging and rating schema and we created wiki’s for all our datasets so that as we used them we could capture what we learned each time, then we’d collectively be smarter as we moved along. It was from this internal system that the idea for the data repository sprang. I loved looking at all the different mapping mashups that came along, but inevitably I wanted to be able to mashup the different mashups. Pull the data from all sorts of different mashups onto to one map to run analysis and analyze all new location problems. Then the – ah hah – what if we hooked up a social network to our data repository, so that anyone could share data – mashup their data with our data or anyone else’s data. So there could be a place where you could connect with the people behind that data and learn from their expertise – to pull the intelligence from the edges of networks to open new possibilities of what problems could be analyzed and how.

Some of my best sources of data were my friends that would send me different datasets they had found or had access to. If we could multiply that effect and add the benefits of the data search and wiki system we’d developed it could be a powerful combination. While we are going to be contributing all our data to the repository the real value is going to be from other people joining and contributing their expertise and data. The benefit is being able to expose your data and expertise to a whole new audience. The non-GIS public – the 100 million people that downloaded Google Earth and are enthralled by the thousands of map mashups on GoogleMapsMania, ViaVirtualEarth, and the ProgrammableWeb to name a few. The goal is to not only expose to our/your data to more people, but also have ability to combine that with other contributor’s data to examine all sorts of new possibilities. What we get is an audience for our geospatial software services to analyze the data, quickly search through it, and intuitively decipher it. This does not mean that only our web services can play. The value only increase with other technologies thrown at the data and that is the beauty of mashups in general. The key to all of this is participation. So far the email responses have been great and if you’d like participate please get in touch with us at info@geoiq.com.

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