Zopto Addressing System
Zopto is a new community mapping tool, and it’s unique because it uses its own addressing system. The Zopto team has created a new way of writing and sharing location data. Instead of using the traditional, integer-based lat-long location data format, they use a contextual, human-readable data format. For example, Zopto can accurately map any location using something like:
ca/san+francisco/san+francisco/third+street/500/third+floor
That’s a link i generated on the fly. The context is pretty easy to understand (San Francisco is named twice, once for county and once for city).
Ben Nolan, technical director of Projectx Technology — creators of Zapto and ZoomIn — gave the demo. ZoomIn is largest mapping site in New Zealand and the fastest-growing mapping site in Australia. They also built their own rendered maps of New Zealand using a handful of cameras and a bank of borrowed computers — the same machines that were used to render digital images in the new King Kong movie.
The Zopto maps interact with their JavaScript API, their geospatial database and the community website. Like with other social mapping services, Zopto users can add tags, comments, photos and the like. One of the goals of the project is to let users tie content on a web page to a geographical location. They make it easy, because web content that describes a places can be linked to any physical location on a map using their common sense syntax. Zopto also supports arbitrary and unique nested information data, such as “upstairs” or “third+floor,” as in my example. Put those terms in HREF links and they can be indexed easily by search engines.
Check out the Zopto preview. California, Washington and New York are online right now with more locations to follow. There’s also a discussion group for Zopto on Google Groups
