Geospatial Semantic Web Blog

Forbes.com reports the most expensive real estate zip codes of 2005. Here is an interactive map that shows the concentration of those zip codes in different states. Though it’s not powered by Google Maps or Yahoo! Maps, but it gets the job done.

According the report, about half of the most expensive zip codes are located in California. The most expensive zip code is 94027, and the median home sales price there is $2.5 million.

Looking at the data, it got me to think about geospatial semantic web applications. I wonder if any real estate applications can exploit this information? Assuming there is such type of applications, we face with one problem — there is no easy way to acquire the data from Forbes.com. Right now, the information is published in an HTML page. It’s difficult to acquire the home sales price information without building some kind of ad hoc content scraper.

I think few different semantic web solutions can be useful. (1) Forbes can use Microformats to annotate the already published HTML data. As long as the Microformat tags are shared with the public, application developers can build XHTML parsers to extract the annotated information. (2) Forbes can also develop simple OWL/RDF ontologies for describing the most expensive zip codes. There is only few concepts need to be modeled: median home sales price, zip code, ranking, and location. Once ontologies are defined, the web page can include a meta-link that points to an OWL/RDF document of the most expensive zip codes. Real estate applications can read this document and make use of the data.

GeoSpatial Expert, a company specializes in developing software for GPS cameras and geotagged digital photos, announces the release of GPS-Photo Link 4.0 that add Google Earth functionality.

A key business of the company is selling GPS camera bundles. For example, their GeoExplorer Bundle comes with a GPS camera and software for processing geotagged photos. The GPS camera supports wireless communication over Bluetooth (i.e., receiving GPS signals from a Bluetooth GPS module).

As location-based technology enters the mainstream consumer market, I think we will see more wide usage of GPS cameras and applications of geotagged digital photos. Though I think many people (including me) would be interested to buy a set of those GeoExplorer Bundles, but I think its price ($3000-$6000) is a bit too expensive for an average consumer.