GeoRSS And Geonames For Philanthropy
I heard about Kiva.ORG in a BusinessWeek podcast. After visiting its website, I think there are few places where GeoRSS (in the RDF/A syntax) and Geonames can be used to enhance the site’s functionality.
Kiva.ORG Background
It’s a microfinance website for people in the developing countries. Its business model is in the intersection between peer-to-peer financing and philanthropy. The goal is to help developing country businesses to borrow small loans from a large group of Web users, so that they can avoid paying high interests to the banks.
For example, a person in Uganda can request a $500 loan and use it for buying and selling more poultry. One or more lenders (anyone on the Web) may decide to grant loans to that person in increments as tiny as $25. After few years, that person will pay back the loans to the lenders.
How GeoRSS and Geonames Can Help
I went to the website and discovered the site has a relative weak search and browsing interface. In particular, there is no way to group loan requests based on geographical locations (e.g., countries, cities and regions).
Took a look at individual loan pages. Each page actually has standard ways to describe location information — e.g., Location: Mbale, Uganda.
It should be relative easy to add GeoRSS points (in the RDF/A syntax) to describe these location information (an alternative maybe using Microformat Geo or W3C Geo). Once the location information is annotated, one can imagine building a map mashup to display loan requests in a geospatial perspective. One can also build search engines to support spatial queries such as “find me all loans with from Mbale”.
Since Kiva.ORG webmasters may not be GIS experts, it will be nice if we can find ways to automatically geocode location information and describe that using GeoRSS. This automatic geocoding procedure can be developed using Geonames’s webservices. Take a string “Mbale” or “Uganda”, and send to Geonames’s search service. The procedure will get back JSON or XML description of the location, which include latitude and longitude. This will then be used to annotate the location information in a Kiva loan page.
Can you think of other ways to help Kiva.ORG to become more “geospatially intelligent”?
You can learn more about Kiva.ORG at its website and listen to this podcast.
Hello!
I’ve also been thinking that Mapping would greatly add to the impact of Kiva.org. Following your thoughts, I’ve quickly produced
http://mapufacture.com/georss/map/show/146
With the RSS feed of loan requests published by Kiva, I ran the feed through Geonames RSS to GeoRSS Converter, and added the resulting GeoRSS feed to mapufacture.
The result is ok, good geocoding, and very easy to put together .. the major issue being that multiple loan requests are placed on the same location (there are several Tanzania loans). This is more an issue with GeoRSS display in mapufacture (something we’re busy working on improving).
This may be good enough to approach Kiva, to demonstrate the potential for deeper mapping integration in their site. Want to try?
Cheers
Mikel
Comment by Mikel Maron — July 24, 2006 @ 4:39 am
Mikel, excellent work!
Comment by harrychen — July 24, 2006 @ 7:30 am
[...] A couple weeks ago, Harry at the excellent Geospatial Semantic Web Blog posted on GeoRSS and Geonames for Philanthropy. His suggestion to use Geonames to produce GeoRSS for Kiva was a good one. And a simple one. Chained together with mapufacture, this was a one minute job to produce a map of Kiva loans, an approach generally useful for the Semantic Web. From such an easy demonstration, Kiva is now thinking about how to integrate mapping more directly in their site. [...]
Pingback by Brain Off » Maps that Matter — August 7, 2006 @ 4:32 pm
[...] GeoRSS and Geonames for philanthropy [...]
Pingback by Geospatial Semantic Web Blog - GIS Data Integration, Geo Ontology, Geo Tagging & Geo Web 2.0 News » Blog Archive » Geotagged blogs are rare in the blogosphere — September 25, 2006 @ 12:46 pm
Wow! Kiva is built on some of the innovations that are arising out of Web 2.0 but it looks like we’ve barely scratched the surface! The ability to search by various affinities, such as geographical regions, would be amazing! We just added social networking functionality to the portal, where a specific enterprise can list where each of the individual loans are coming from (geography based). Should a loaner choose, a public profile can be accessed, listing that loaner’s portfolio and simple bio. This allows further dialogue between the loaner and the borrower. At the same time, it will also encourage fellow loaners to dialogue, as they can now learn a bit about others in this like-minded community.
Thank you for posting about Kiva. You’ve given your audience a wonderful opportunity to get connected with something that’s worthwhile, in a relevant and practical manner!
Regards,
Tim (volunteer with Kiva.org)
Comment by Tim — October 31, 2006 @ 10:18 pm