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

After coming across Freebase’s blog post about using their data for map generation I thought it would be fun to dig in a little deeper. According to the post Jamie Taylor of Freebase teamed up with Jonathan Lowe of GisWebsite. A very clever pairing and I’m interested to see the final results.

In the mean time a bit of hypothesizing. From the photo -

It looks like they are using Jonathan’s Giswebsite platform which looks to be a combination of UMN’s Mapserver and probably PostGIS. From the post all the data on the map comes from Freebase, so we can infer that Freebase is support polygons, points, and most likely polylines. This alone is great to see because it means that Freebase geo-support is for more than just lat/long features. A little digging on Freebase itself confirms this. On Jonathan’s data “types” page there are schemas for:

# FeatureCollection,
# Feature,
# GeometryCollection,
# Box,
# MultiPolygon,
# MultiLineString,
# MultiPoint,
# Polygon,
# LineString

Of these only “polygon” and “linestring” had descriptions and examples. For instance when you click on polygon you get a set of results for mostly commons and ponds in the UK, which look much like this result for “Eagle Pond“. Lots of possibilities in this framework, and we are beginning to see some simple and effective ones implemented already – like this mashup up buildings by famous architects pulled from Freebase. Look forward to learning more when it is presented at Where 2.0.

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