Geospatial Semantic Web Blog

Zillow, an online real estate service company, is giving away 7000+ neighborhood boundary data in the ESRI Arc Shapefile format.

The boundary lines for over 7,000 neighborhoods around the United States covering roughly 150 cities. These neighborhood shapes are now available, zipped up in the Arc Shapefile format, for anyone to download.

By open source the data to the public, Zillow hopes the public can help it to improve the quality of the data. The accuracy of boundary line data is really important to Zillow’s real estate web service.

Additionally, it’s a way for people to use and contribute to our growing database to help improve the boundary lines, though you do have to have some GIS technical knowledge (note that you’ll need ArcGIS software to work with the actual shapefiles). After all, we don’t know Phoenix like a local agent does nor do we know Boston like a Boston resident does. If your city is not one of the 150 cities covered currently, and you know enough GIS (or have access to someone who does), you can draw your own boundaries for your city and notify us by posting a thread in Zillow Discussions. We’ll add them to the database of neighborhoods available for download and will work to eventually integrate them into Zillow.

This is a great news to those are interested in free geospatial data. I think Geonames probably can make use of this dataset.

Spotted on the All Points Blog

Read/WriteWeb compiled it’s list of 100 alternative search engines (as of April 2007) — i.e., search engines other than Google, MSN, Yahoo! and Ask. While it’s pretty amazing to see different categories of search engines (people search, video search, cluster search, social search etc.), the list is missing one important search category: Semantic Web search engines.

Search engines of the Semantic Web should be added to the list:

• Swoogle: triple and ontology search
• SWSE: combines typical web search with RDF query filters

So, will Semantic Web search engines change the way we search the Web? Yes, they will. However, this new wave of Web 3.0 search engines will not replace the existing search engines. Like those 100 alternative search engines mentioned in Read/WriteWeb, they together will compete with the current giants for market shares in various specialized search categories — videos, blogs, triples, metadata etc.

Here is my speculation.

It’s clear that Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask are the current champions of general-purpose Web search. However, it’s unclear if they can also be the champions of domain-specific search. My guess is that they can’t.

Given that there are at least 100 + 2 other different search engines in the competition, few are likely to overpower the existing giants in the specialized web search. Of course, this is only true if cash-rich companies like Google and Microsoft don’t buyout the new startups before they get a chance to become successful.

Entrepreneurs are constantly in the look out for Semantic Web applications that will create business value. Pellet, an OWL-DL reasoner in Java, is a very successful Semantic Web application. Clark & Parsia is now in process to offer commercial support for Pellet. Also, the company is considering to create Semantic Web applications for public policy reasoning and managment.
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Recently I learned about Centiare from Gregory Kohs, a co-developer of the application. Centiare is a new Wiki application that builds on the Semantic MediaWiki features.

Centiare is a unique online reference directory that anyone can use. You can set up your very own Directory page about yourself or your business, and no other users can edit it. That’s how the Directory pages work — if you create it, you own it.

[Y]ou’re encouraged to express advocate points-of-view (APOV); include links to your products, artwork, blogs, or books you’ve written; and create wiki-links to any other pages in Centiare that you find interesting.

Centiare differs from other community-based Wiki sites in several ways.
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As digital maps and navigation systems increasing become an important part of our everyday lives, companies that bet on location-based services are aggressively expanding their GIS database. NAVTEQ announced the acquisition of Traffic.com, a leading provider of traffic information and technology to deliver it.

There are two reasons why GIS data is important to the success of a company like NAVTEQ. First, without sufficient amount of and diverse types of GIS data, the feature capability of NAVTEQ’s prorducts will be limited. No matter how sophisticated a product is, without data, it’s useless to the customers.

Second, being a GIS data provider is a “sticky” business — once you became the leader, it’s hard to replace you. Building cutting-edge GIS applications such as Yahoo! Maps and Google Earth requires a great deal of software design and engineering effort. Every data customers of NAVTEQ probably have spent sufficient amount of time and effort to get their data aligned, fix streaming performance issues and simply get things to work. Once NAVTEQ became the data provider of a successful application, it’ll be difficult to convince developers to switch to another provider.

Though the stock price of NAVTEQ is not edging up north as fast as Google, but it’s growth prospective does seem very positive. As the king of GIS data, it will be easy for the company to convince others like Verizon, Spring Nextel, Google and MapQuest to partner and build their next generation map services and location-based services on NAVTEQ’s products and services.

Richard MacManus at ZDNet writes his view on Web 2.0 clone applications. He observed that every country has its set of Web 2.0 clones — bookmarking sites that looks del.icio.us, photo sharing sites that like Flickr, social networking sites like MySpace, community news sites like digg, etc. He criticizes those Web 2.0 clones being non-innovative.

It’s true that most of the clone apps don’t come with innovative ideas, but it would be unwise to think that they totally have no values. Contrary to Richard’s point of view, I think clone apps are essential ingredients in helping the IT business in developing countries to become innovative.

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Guardian Solutions, a Florida-based video surveillance solution provider, has developed a new software product that uses Google Earth to display 3D models of video surveillances intelligence.

This new product, GView (TM), is aimed to provide the mass market an effective tool to gain the benefits of situation awareness — e.g.,stopping vandalism and defeating malicious activities such as sabotage and terrorism.

While I was digging for GView screenshots, I found few interesting clips of the company’s video surveillance technology.

• Tracking a boat in the sea
• Tracking traffic movements in the dark
• Tracking intruder
  
• Directional movements detection

Google announced that it will let business to offer discount coupons to people who use its Google Maps service.

A business will be able to upload information for coupons, including images, and Google will display a link to those coupons when the business name is displayed. Users can then print the coupons and take them to the merchant.

This is a smart business move. While an advertising model such AdWords works well for companies that want to increase web site traffics, this model doesn’t necessary meet the needs of local business such as street-corner pizza restaurants and liquor stores. This new combination of Google Maps and coupon advertising should provide additional revenues for Google.

Source: New at Google: Local Coupons, NYTimes