GeoMata

GeoMata maps locations to web content (audio / video / websites). Our service currently contains over 140k of these "blips". You can add new blips easily from within the app itself and shared them with the world (wikipedia style), keep them private, or share them with only people you authorize.

While visiting Russia, I found myself standing near Red Square, looking at a statue of a seemingly important man on a horse. Unable to read the Russian inscription, I moved on to look at something else, regretting that I couldn't learn anything more.

It later occurred to me, that this monument and every other monument in the world, has a unique geocoding. Wouldn't it be fantastic if there existed a service that could pair a geocoding with an arbitrary web resource such as a web page? With such a service, a GPS enabled device could perform a query on my current location, and then instantly present me with something like a wikipedia entry via my phones built in browser. How awesome would that be?!

How GeoMata Works

GeoMata is three distinct pieces, the data service with a REST interface, the GeoMata website, and the Android client.

The primary interface of the client is simply a list of all the available blips (geo -> website pairings) sorted by proximity. Clicking on one of them launches the web browser and displays the web resource associated with that blip. The web resource can be either a web page, audio file, or video. The list interface will display an icon letting you know exactly what type of resource is available.

GeoMata was bootstrapped by parsing Wikipedia and finding every geocoded entry that we could. Currently there are over 145,000 “blips” in the GeoMata system. It's a nice start, but it's not nearly enough. To have a truly rich dataset, anyone running GeoMata on their Android device can add new blips to the system. By distributing the application for free, it's our hope that users of GeoMata will grow our dataset the same way Wikipedia has blossomed over the years.

Anyone can add new data to the system by either visiting the website

or directly from GeoMata itself running on a GPS aware device. Not all devices have suitable interfaces for data entry (imagine typing in a long URL). To simplify the submission process for such devices, you can bookmark your current location, associate it with a short descriptive name, and the blip will be automatically associated with your user account on the GeoMata website. You can defer entering all the gory details until later you get back to the home or office. Composing a summary or entering long URL's is much more comfortable to do on a desktop system, so that's the anticipated use pattern.

Additionally, when creating a new blip, you can select whether the blip will be public or private. A public blip is inserted into an approval queue, where an administrator can take a look and approve it, after which it's made available to everyone. A private blip, however, will only be displayed in the query results of the user who created it, or anyone else they explicitly authorize. You can subscribe to another users private blips (The concept is analogous to subscribing to an RSS feed, except that it requires consent from the feed's owner).

GeoMata has a secondary viewing mode that plots all the nearby blips on a map. Touching or selecting one will display the abstract (summary) in a dialog and give you the option to open the resource.

Caveats :

* Only streaming mp4 videos are supported (limitation of the current SDK).

* Private blips can be grouped into a named “location set”. For instance, you could create a location set called “My favorite places to eat”, and then allow your friends to subscribe to that set. This functionality exists in the backend, but not on the Android client yet. (The client currently only supports public/private. The default location sets).

* The ADC prototype just follows the Android SDK's mock GPS route along 101. Obviously this application would be a lot more interesting on a live GPS device.

* Many of the icons used in the ADC version of GeoMata are from the Tango Desktop Project.

* In the list and map view, public/private blips are color-coded. (blue icons are private, green are public on the map view).