Today Tyler Bell, Product Manager for the Geo Technologies group at
Yahoo!, spoke at SI on the subject of Geo Informatics (or as the wikipedia entry puts it, geoinformatics.
Talk Description: Location-Aware Applications are all the rage in today's
technology and start-up scene. Yet understanding location and providing
the best user experience entails much more than simply putting dots on a
map. This short talk provides an overview of how Yahoo! tackles
geographic context and entity recognition to connect our users with the
world around them.
Read on for notes from SOCHI attendees!
The first web was the web of documents, blue text/purple link stuff. Then came web 2.0, web of people (isn't everyone tired of that term!?). This is when the human began to play a role. It was all about connecting with individuals, connecting individuals to each other. Now we are reaching the
"web of the world" - geo-enriched, location-aware internet.
Location allows us to make order in a chaotic network. The internet is like the universe, billions of galaxies and stars; how do you make sense of it all? The 'social web' is one lens through which we make sense of all the information available to us. We're moving away from general recommendations, like those available on Yelp, and moving toward recommendations from people we know. 'Location' is the next lens that allows us to view/filter the information coming to us. We want to filter the noise, and location-based information helps us to do that; things near to us are often more interesting than things that are far away. For instance, the pothole on my street is far more annoying to me than the pothole two streets over.
Location-based advertising & iPhone apps, GPS-enabled phones, location device sales, and OSM (Open Street Map) mappers have increased exponentially over the past few years. There are over 110 million geo-tagged images on Flickr now! 'Geoclustr': algorithm that can reconstruct geometry/geography based on tags entered into flickr. (He then showed a map of Texas reconstituted based on tagged images, which interestingly jutted out past the southern coast due to people taking pictures from the sea and tagging them with 'Texas.')
How does place relate to space? At Yahoo! they focus on place over space - what is the semantic meaning of place? They take every place in the world, and they want to capture the name as people actually call it.
Tyler showed map of london tube as the lines actually run, and then a version that shows lines at 90 and 45 degree angles for more straightforward navigation - at Yahoo! they don't care about the exact geography, but they want to know that the facts about each place are correct. This is where they get into the information management side of things - developing a geographic ontology, interrelated concepts that relate to other concepts through a series of structured properties. Not just parent-child relationships.
Geotagged content helps users find contextual information and helps search engines provide more relevant content - for example, if there are no mechanics in San Gabriel county, users can search in surrounding counties. But obtaining tagged content that has simple coordinates doesn't provide enough context - should the context be within a county, city, state, region, etc? That point in space exists within all of the above categories, so there are nuances around retrieving and displaying content with the appropriate level of detail.
Geo/Non-Geo Disambiguation
Often place names are also person or product names (Paris Hilton, Panama hat, Oxford shoes). Everything about place is personal and subjective. Their system has to figure out which is which. If a picture of Paris Hilton shows up on a website that provides information on places to stay in Paris, that is bad - users will leave. Another form of disambiguation is common words - To, That, The - are all towns in other countries. There are also confusing places like Colorado, TX and Oregon, AK. There are 45 Springfields in the US and 10 'Wayne's in Pennsylvania. System needs to calculate which one you are looking for. He says that this geo/non-geo disambiguation is mostly automated now, but not completely - it started out as a manual process originally.
3 products at Yahoo! that deal with place:
Placemaker
GeoPlanet
Fire eagle
This talk was really interesting and mind-stretching!
