You’re invited to join an ad hoc, international group of people interested in implementing these systems, which I’ll just call POIs for short. I’ve been involved in the World Wide Web POI Working Group, which approached the topic from an information modeling standpoint, and the American Association of Geographers workshop, where practitioners shared their experiences.

Many of us now feel the time is right to keep the momentum going, and have a slightly more formal channel for occasional communication. Some of us are implementing the W3C’s draft spec, and are looking to partner in my effort to create a unified, global linked database of all POI information with the OpenPOIs Repository. And some are just looking for data modeling commiseration. No matter what your take on the POI world is, please join us.

We’re starting with informal, monthly “brown bag” teleconferences at 3pm UTC / 11am US Eastern on the first Thursday of each month with the first gathering this Thursday, May 3rd. If you’re interested, please subscribe to the mailing list. All details about meeting times and phone numbers will be announced there.

1. OpenPOIs will index all web resources related to a POI as possible
2. OpenPOIs will be the best source of correct place name spellings
3. OpenPOIs will be multi-lingual
4. OpenPOIs is open for third-party contributions and corrections

The system went public in alpha stage earlier this month with some US data. We are currently rebuilding the database with global coverage in preparation for a beta launch in a few weeks. It’s limited to a basic map and some read-only RESTful queries right now, with a full geographic search API coming soon.

Join the public announcement mailing list and read this blog to stay abreast of the advances coming soon.

Finally, for those of you interested in working with OpenPOIs, or building your own place name database or gazetteer, a “birds of a feather” interest group has formed with a mailing list here, and a monthly teleconference (join the list for access information).

Location data is everywhere. From huge government databases of geographic features to your pictures in Facebook, it seems like almost every piece of information around nowadays is tagged with its location. However, it still seems that no one is effectively sharing information, or building the smart, next-generation systems that will surely rely on data from multiple, linked information sources.

We in the geospatial profession believe that location is the great common denominator. It has the best potential to be the bridge between systems of related data sets. But how do we devise a simple way to describe places and relationships between them that will appeal to 85% of the developer community?

The W3C Points of Interest Working Group has been tackling this problem throughout 2011, and is nearing completion of a fairly final draft of a specification. You can see the work on the POI Wiki, and join the public mailing list by sending an email here. In this group, we’ve created a relatively simple data model, and expect that people write POI data in JSON, RDF and/or XML format. The jury is still out on which format will win.

What I hope a common format will do is allow everyone, from Yelp to Facebook to humanitarian organizations and event defense departments all over the world, to share basic location information about common places. I think this will not only strengthen the core business propositions of these groups, but even enhance them, freeing up time from the mundane, repetitive task of maintaining accurate locations and creating more time for real application enhancements.

I believe this effort is the most important activity in the geospatial field at the moment, and will be writing and coding heavily around POIs. Join me and make 2012 the year of the POI!

In short, here are example points, lines and polygons that are now legal GML.

<Point>
   <posList>42.3 -71.9</posList>
</Point>

<LineString>
   <posList>42.3 -71.9 42.4 -71.8</posList>
</LineString>

<SimplePolygon>
   <posList>42.3 -71.9 42.5 -72.2 42.4 -72.1 42.4 -72.0</posList>
</SimplePolygon>

Download the standard here.

So the bug reporting system has too many bugs to allow bug reporting?

http://blog.technologyofcontent.com/2010/01/json-vs-xml/

see the “Against XML namespaces” section

I proposed a similar architecture in my AAG presentation earlier this year called, Historical Gazetteers and Points of Interest. You can also find it on OGC Network.

Can’t wait to see how this all plays out.

Note to self – write that post about why this is the year of the POI…

I see this way too often. Is it that hard to manage 140 character data fields?