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 are very excited to announce that Mapufacture is joining FortiusOne. What started off as a joke at the bar “we should just combine the companies together to make Geo-Voltron” has quickly turned into reality. We’ve always admired the work Andrew and Mikel have done in the community, and having the opportunity to work with them on a regular basis was one that we could not pass up.

In addition to working with great people we also saw great potential in blending our technologies. Mapufacture has done a phenomenal job pushing open standards on the GeoWeb and making dynamic data available on maps. In many ways they embodied the core of what many have defined as neogeography. At F1 we’ve had a mission of bridging the GeoWeb and GIS, and have invested lots of effort in bringing the vast world of GIS data to the GeoWeb and the public at large.

The long term vision has been to eventually fuse the personal and dynamic data of the GeoWeb (long tail) with the static and statistical data of GIS (short tail). Mapufacture presented us the opportunity to accelerate that vision and bring a broader vision of geospatial awareness to the public. The chance to bring dynamic and static data together in an intuitive way. The opportunity to combine quantitative data with qualitative user generated feedback.

Imagine a world where it is not only possible to look at toxic release locations by volume of discharge, but also have the citizenry comment with words, photo and video on the impact it is having on their community. What if an accident happened at a toxic release point? You can now bring in real time weather and see if wind dispersal could be a hazard for response. The examples are innumerable. It could be your sales data dynamically generating from Salesforce.com and combined with detailed demographic data to better coordinate your next marketing campaign.

There is obviously a lot of work to be done, but the Mapufacture and FortiusOne teams are both excited to bring the potential of what the GeoWeb can be to the market. We are excited and look forward to showing the first step in that vision later this month. In the mean time we’d love to get your thoughts on possible new logos for Geo-Voltron.

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