I’m excited to announce that Andrei Taraschuk, from UMapper and AFComponents, has officially joined the FortiusOne engineering team. He will be head of our visualization development in building out Maker to encompass the capabilities we’ve been building into the underlying GeoCommons platform for the last few years.

I’ve been friends with Andrei through my work on Mapufacture and he has clearly done ground-breaking work in developing visualization and mapping platforms. He built AFComponents and developed the first ActionScript compatible mapping library for modern mapping providers such as Google, Microsoft, and others. This evolved into UMapper which continued to grow and add features for simple map creation and embedding that’s been used by numerous media and enterprises such as USA Today, National Geographic, and a place we’ve been featured as well, the Huffington Post.

As his role of head of visualization, Andrei will continuing to evolve our map, and non-cartographic, visualization components. We’ve worked with some of the best in the industry such as AxisMaps and Stamen Design, as well as the incredibly bright engineers at FortiusOne to develop some great capabilities you’ll be seeing soon. But we’re really excited about the ideas and energy that Andrei will be bringing to the team – so definitely expect some even more amazing things soon!

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As he mentioned this morning on Twitter, Tim “Chippy” Waters is coming onboard to bring some serious psychogeography and new geospatial capabilities to GeoCommons.

Tim has many accomplishments, from Geocodr, the first geocoder based on Flickr photo tags that let you search for “happiness in New York” (map), even before you could download the shapefiles – to his more recent and well known efforts in building MapWarper in use by the New York Public Library for georectifying and sharing out their historic map archives.

In addition, Tim was responsible for the first uploads of the Haitian GIS data from CNIGS almost one year to the day before the earthquake this past January. He stood up a MapWarper specifically for relief efforts as thousands of volunteers around the world rectified and traced historics maps of Haiti from the 1990′s. He has also been an active member of OpenStreetMap, including hosting worldwide mapping parties.

We’re excited to have Tim joining the FortiusOne team – and definitely expect to see some great new geospatial features from him in GeoCommons in the very near future.

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This week some of the other engineers are off to Google I/O, look for plenty of GeoIQ and Geocommons goodness in the Developer Sandbox there.  FortiusOne is a Google Enterprise Partner and we’ve performed integration with Google applications on both the Geocommons and GeoIQ side.  On Geocommons we’ve integrated with both the Google Earth Plugin and the Google Maps API.  Geocommons and GeoIQ both support KML for upload and download of Finder overlays as well as download of maps as KML.  Specifically On the enterprise side GeoIQ allows you to hook into your organization’s Google Earth Fusion Server.  This enables you to use tiles from the Fusion Server as well as globes with the Google Earth Plugin.

Also in the Sandbox we’ll be demonstrating our REST API and JavaScript API.  Our documentation and some sample code is available on Github. For questions about either API join our API Google Group.   As a company that believes in eating our own dog food Map of the News is built utilizing these APIs.  To see the most current dashboard in action checkout maps of the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill.

If you stop by look for Matt Dew or Andrew Semprebon, tell them “wonderchook” sent you!

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OpenSearch specifies rules for sending and receiving data from websites. GeoCommons supports OpenSearch for querying of both maps and overlays.  For non-programmers the most common use of OpenSearch is adding search providers to your browser. Google Chrome, Internet Explorer and Firefox all support OpenSearch.

Here is the dropdown of my search providers in Firefox. In order to add an Finder! As an OpenSearch provider you navigate to http://finder.geocommons.com and open the Search Engine dropdown. Select Add “GeoCommons Finder Data” to add overlay search support to Firefox.

Now when you select Finder! as your active Search Engine in Firefox you can search overlays.  To add the ability to search Maker! maps go to http://maker.geocommons.com and perform the same steps. Now you can search Maker! as well.  To search overlays and maps at the same time you can go to http://www.geocommons.com and add GeoCommons as a search provider.

To add GeoCommons as a Search Provider in Google Chrome navigate your browser to both Finder! and Maker! respectively and it will be added.

Chrome additionally allows you to create keywords to various search providers to edit the keyword go to your preferences in Chrome and click the “Manage” button.  Double click on the provider you want to edit and you can then edit the keyword.  I made my keyword for Finder “F!” so I can quickly search for datasets in Finder by typing “F!” and then my search terms.

Adding OpenSearch to Internet Explorer 8 is straight forward as well.  When you navigate to Maker or Finder click arrow in the IE search box and select “Add Search Providers” and select to add Finder Data or Maker Maps as a Search Provider.

Windows 7 supports OpenSearch from within Windows Explorer.  To add Finder download the Finder OpenSearch Specification File and rename the “.xml” file extension to “.osdx.”  Next right click on the file and select “Create Search Connector.”  To search Finder now open “Searches” and select Finder as your Search Connector.

OpenSearch is not only awesome for end users of applications though, it is also great for developers.  FortiusOne’s own Map of the News is built using the GeoCommons OpenSearch API and JavaScript API.  For example in the Afghanistan Election Dashboard the menu where which map to display is chosen a tag is added for each group of maps.  ”2009 Afghanistan Election Results” is all of the maps tagged “afghanresults” on the http://news.geocommons.com GeoIQ server.  The results are returned in json and then displayed in the menu.

For more information on Geocommons Search API please see our documentation and our OpenSearch description document.  More information on OpenSearch is available at OpenSearch.org.

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