Platial, trying to help link people to people.
People have been mapping their lives, autobiogeography: where you were born, went to school, etc. They are mapping things of historical importance, e.g. ‘Women who changed the world’. Maps for hobbies and interests, e.g. bird-watchers and cat-lovers.
Over 4000 maps. Everything from food to activists to romantic encounters.
Has tags and comments. Can embed video.
When people get to ‘own’ places, geopolitical boundaries start to melt. Initial analysis. They looked at tags and found a social topography irrelevant to proximity or national borders. Correlated cities based on users, and some cities are gateways to other cities.
Some themes within the tags are universal from city to city, e.g. city names, coffee, restaurants, food, art and home.
Aggregating geodata in Placedb. Taking location point data such as geoRSS or geotagged data, or data that includes city or street names, and then apply comparative analysis algorithms to find the location of documents with no obvious location. So can collect Flickr pictures, Reuters stories, etc. for a specific area, e.g. your home town, and this is fed into Platial, e.g. the London page.
Need more geofeeds into Placedb.