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

We made the decision to postpone our launch a few weeks so we could do it at Where 2.0 along with the Ignite event on May 28th.  Should be a great forum to kick things off and lots of geo type people to give us feedback and hopefully come play with it.  The good news is there is going to be lots of content to play with on day one – there are 2 billion location attributes, 25 million locations, 35,000 variables describing a set of locations, and 1500 unique datasets of information.  When we say unique data sets we don’t mean a few push pins – think census tracts level data (64,892 polygons) on occupations , demographics, what time people leave for work etc., campaign contributions (where is Barak beating Clinton) by zip code (29,699 polygons), or all the meth labs (2,228 points) busted by the DEA  (was there one in your neighborhood?).  Of course not all the data sets are massive, but you have the ability to look at the broad spectrum of data out there.

The goal is to make the world of detailed geospatial data on everything from crime statistics to meteorite strikes at your finger tips.  You can mashup any of the interesting data you find or add your own.  The best part is when you contribute data you have a huge selection on content to instantly mash it up with.  You can make maps to tell your story on GeoCommons and share those with others or download the raw data as KML and come up with something on your own.  We’ll be pushing out the new version of GeoCommons  to our beta group on the 12th of May.  If you’d like to join the beta group drop us a line at info@fortiusone.com.

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