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

The release of Google My Maps caused quite a lot of stir in the office and on the blogs, not to mention calls from investors asking if this was trouble for us, and how exactly we are different. Which considering the buzz on the blogs was a fair question to ask, from Giga Om “The consequences of Google’s announcement could be quite dire for a gaggle of map mashup start-ups including Platial, Frappr, Flagr and Plazes, to name a few — that have raised millions of dollars in venture capital.”

While it is a very good question what I found far more interesting was a sentence at the end of Om’s post

“Google, like its peers, is realizing that in the future when digital content explodes exponentially, context will become more important. Especially, when it comes to local search. MyMaps are a quick way to provide some context. It will only be a matter of time before these Google-hosted map mash-ups start showing up next to local search results.”

The concept of how you provide context to maps and local search has been one of our driving missions here. It was also the basis of our last blog post about how our approach to delivering context to maps had been tagged as a Web 3.0 thing (which we are still not so sure about). Needless to say we were pretty stoked about “context” being part of the future for local search. Which is a nice segue to describing how we are different from My Maps. The big difference is that we are trying to organize and make consumable the world of geospatial data and creatively combining that with user generated data like what is being mashed up in My Maps.

One of the tough things with geospatial data is that it is technical and not user friendly. While it often provides great context about a location it usually needs context for your average user to understand it in the first place. Mookie has built a great little widget to do this which we’ll be offering up as an API for developers to play with in the near future. Probably the easiest way to explain it is with an example.

Lets say that a user is interested in knowing about the air quality for a location. They may live there, planning on visiting, moving there, or just want to compare two places to see which has the better air to breathe. EPA has some great data on air quality but it is fairly terrible to work with if you can even find the GIS data to download. On GeoCommons you just type in “air quality” or “air” etc. etc. and it pops up. With Mookie’s new widget you can go beyond just making a map to creating an intelligent contextual description of the data. For instance a user chooses to look at average air quality index and clicks on Denver or types in a Denver address they would get:

” The mile high city- Denver, CO

The Median Air Quality Index (AQI) is 40. The Median Air Quality Index (AQI) is a measure of how unhealthy the air is in the area. High AQI values are bad. This index was produced by the EPA. This value is average (66th percentile).”

The user now has a short story describing the air quality in Denver and context to understand it in. It goes towards our metaphor (Minh’s actually) of building technology that enables people to tell stories with maps. It also goes back to allowing people to create contexts about locations they are interested in. In this case we are just describing the context of one variable of one data set, but the system is built to allow people to explore a wide range of contexts for all sorts of user defined locations. This is our take on the future of local search and My Maps is a definite reminder of the need keep innovating and avoiding commodity mash ups that can easily be duplicated. If anyone happens to be out at Location Intelligence in San Francisco next week we’ll be showing off some the technology, so please stop by and give us some feedback.

Popularity: 7% [?]