Location-based web services are all the rage right now, but for most of us the actual geographic location isn’t very interesting — do you know where “40.737813,-73.997887″ is off the top of your head? No? How about “West 14th Street bet. 6th Ave. and 7th Ave?”

For the geographic web to become useful geodata has to be converted into something humans actually understand. Enter OpenStreetBlock.

OpenStreetBlock is a new web service that takes geographic coordinates (latitude/longitude pairs) and turns them into an actual city block description. The result is textual information which, in many cases, will be even more meaningful to your users than the ubiquitous pin on a map.

If you’d like to play around with a sampling of data from New York, head over to OpenStreetBlock and try out the New York demos.

If you’ve ever wanted to build your own version of EveryBlock — which pinpoints events, news stories and public data at the city-block level — OpenStreetBlock will go a long way toward getting you there. So long as you can pull geo coordinates out of your source data, OpenStreetBlock can turn that into more meaningful information.

Under the hood OpenStreetBlock relies on OpenStreetMap data and uses PHP in conjunction with a geographic database to turn your coordinates into block descriptions.

As cool as OpenStreetBlock is, getting it up and running on your own site will require a bit of work. Luckily, there are some good tutorials available that will walk you through the process of installing and setting up many of the prerequisites like PostgreSQL and PostGIS (I’ll assume you already have an Apache server with PHP installed).

To get started with OpenStreetBlock, grab the code from GitHub. The next thing you’ll need is a PostgreSQL database with all the PostGIS tools installed. Luckily those are also prerequisites for GeoDjango, so head over to the GeoDjango installation page, skip the Django-specific parts and just follow the Postgres and PostGIS installation instructions.

Next you’ll need to download Osmosis and Osm2pgsql to convert OpenStreetMap data into something Postgres can handle. Head over to OpenStreetMap, zoom into an area you’d like to query with OpenStreetBlock and then choose “export.” Select the OpenStreetMap XML Data option and save the file.

From there you can check out the guide to importing the OpenStreetMap XML Data in the OpenStreetBlock read me.

See Also:

• Where 2.0: SimpleGeo to Launch ‘iTunes for Geodata’
• EveryBlock Source Code Release Offers Glimpse of the Magic Behind the Curtain
• User-Contributed Announcements Give EveryBlock a Human Touch
• Beautiful Websites: Stamen’s Pretty Maps

We’ve seen some colorful map mashups in the past, like Hypercities and HeatMap, but few are as abstract and beautiful to look at as Stamen Design’s Pretty Maps.

The aptly-named app pulls sets of geodata from various freely available open mapping projects and plots them atop one another. Pretty Maps grabs street-level data from OpenStreetMap (the “Wikipedia of maps”), land formation data from Natural Earth and place-name and place-shape data from Flickr shapefiles — Flickr’s outlines generated by the tags people have attached to photos taken in that place. So all the data is from crowdsourced databases and either public domain or licensed through the Creative Commons. The maps are generated using TileStache and PolyMaps, two open source tools developed in-house at Stamen.

The result is a map that’s not so much usable for navigation as it is pretty to look at. Cities degrade into abstract and unique blobs, with pastel colors overlaying one another. The shapes are alien looking in texture and density, but instantly recognizable if you’re already familiar with the terrain.

Stamen Design is a small, San Francisco-based data visualization firm best known in its early days for its work with Digg. Stamen specializes in abstract, trippy geo-spatial data visualizations like Trace and Cabspotting. The firm was also awarded a Knight News Grant in June to visualize publicly-available civic data.

Pretty Maps is both pretty and pretty slow. The tiles take about ten seconds to render at the lower zoom levels. This is because the Stamen team hasn’t really optimized Pretty Maps for performance. The multiple data sets get pulled in separately and are layered inside your browser using JavaScript instead of being combined first and served as one, a conscious design choice: “We wanted to leave all the plumbing exposed so that people could look at it and learn from it and, hopefully, build something new,” Stamen says on its website.

So, there’s your invitation to View Source and start digging around. We can only hope the little Grover “Near, Far” zoom controls are part of the package.

See also

• Other “Beautiful Websites”
• Microsoft Adds OpenStreetMap Layer to Bing Maps
• Where’d You Go Last Summer? Flickr Allows OpenStreetMap, FourSquare Geotags
• Historical Map Mashups Turn Cities Into Glass Onions of Time
• OpenStreetMaps Project Takes Maps in a Different Direction

You can now turn on a special layer in Bing Maps that displays maps from OpenStreetMap, Microsoft has announced.

OpenStreetMap is an open source mapping project that keeps an editable map of the entire globe. Anyone can make edits to the map — it’s been nicknamed the “Wikipedia of maps.” The open source model has proven especially effective in regions of the developing world where very little solid map data exists, and in areas where highly detailed, editable maps are critical for natural-disaster response efforts, like the recent Haiti earthquake.

Microsoft’s adoption of the open source mapping project follows a similar move by MapQuest, which began adding OSM layers last month.

To run layers in Bing Maps, you’ll need the latest version of Microsoft Silverlight and a supported browser. It doesn’t work properly in Google Chrome (at least on the Mac), but IE8, Firefox and Safari had no problems. If you’re using the Ajax controls to view Bing Maps (instead of Silverlight), then you won’t be able to see the OpenStreetMaps layer, but Microsoft says this is something that may make its way into the non-Silverlight version eventually.

Use the map view switcher at the bottom to change layers.

To add OpenStreetMaps to your Bing, go to the App Gallery. Look for the new OpenStreetMaps app in the gallery. Click on it, and your alternative OpenStreetMaps view should launch within Bing Maps.

You can switch back to any of the other standard views in Bing Maps by clicking on the layer control at the bottom of the map window. You’ll notice Bing Maps is using the Mapnik build of OpenStreetMaps for its map layer. You can switch back and forth between the OSM layer and any of the other standard Bing maps layers using the same control.

Microsoft has been quickly adding some innovative features to Bing, especially on its Maps website. In June, Bing Maps added the ability to browse parts of the world in 3-D, and in February it demonstrated indoor panorama views and location-specific videos that are accessible within Bing’s street-side imagery.

Microsoft also ran its King of Bing maps challenge for developers last month, asking them to create innovative apps for the mapping platform. For the contest, a developer named Ricky Brundritt built an app for Bing Maps that estimates your taxi fare within most major U.S. cities.

However, Bing’s reliance on Microsoft’s proprietary Silverlight technology to power these innovations is seen by some as an alienating factor — and an unnecessary one at that, since other mapping platforms like Google Maps accomplish much of the same functionality using JavaScript and other web standards. This is especially important on mobile devices, where the most popular browsers don’t allow for plug-ins like SIlverlight.

Still, it’s heartening to see Bing adding to the momentum OpenStreetMaps is currently enjoying. Anyone can edit the OSM maps, and now that the project is getting some attention — thanks mostly to its efforts in Haiti — edits are coming in more quickly.

According to the latest stats, the project has over a quarter of a million participants and over 1.8 billion uploaded GPS points. Dedicated users are getting creative and finding ways to add even more detail to the existing maps by doing offbeat things like tagging wheelchair ramps, mailboxes and trees in their neighborhoods.

Taxi Fare Calculator link courtesy Mashable

See Also:

• MapQuest U.K Teams Up With OpenStreetMap
• Google Maps Adds More Detail, Takes a Cue From OpenStreetMap
• Disaster Relief 2.0: Tech Tools Help Focus Haiti Resources
• Bing Maps Takes Panoramas Indoors

SAN JOSE, California — A new web service called Geomena is trying to build a geolocation database practically from scratch, and it’s taking a page from Wikipedia’s playbook to do it.

Geomena is an open wi-fi geo database — using a method similar to services from Skyhook and Google, any app plugged in to Geomena can use nearby wi-fi access points to determine your location.

The database is tiny right now. It has around 3,400 geo-tagged access points in the system, most of them around the project’s home base in Portland, Oregon. So, to grow the database as quickly as possible, the Geomena team has launched a new API that lets developers build apps that can enter new wi-fi access point locations.

So, if you’re making a location-based game, a location-sharing Firefox plug-in, or a web-app that relies on geodata, you can rig it up to write new wi-fi location points directly to Geomena’s database, helping it grow through good, old-fashioned crowdsourcing.

The emergence of location as an application platform has led to a bevy of new web services, each of them eager to provide developers with geodata to fuel the current flood of mobile and web-based apps. Most of the buzz at the all-things-location Where 2.0 conference, taking place here this week, has centered around SimpleGeo, a new web data store that just launched its “iTunes for geodata” — a pay-as-you-go solution for developers building location-based apps.

But iTunes isn’t the only model for building a powerful geodata store. Geomena is instead following the Wikipedia model. They’ve made their database entirely open and editable, and they’re licensing all of the data under the Creative Commons.

You could always just add points manually, but with Geomena’s new API, the system is open for developers to create new ways for users to plug in new access points.

Geomena’s Adam DuVander, who announced the API here at Where 2.0, imagines that most developers will build wi-fi access point discovery features into mobile clients or browser plug-ins. He also envisions various games that reward the user for feeding the system with points or badges. [Full disclosure, DuVander used to write for Webmonkey and is still an occasional freelance contributor to Wired.com].

We could even see war-driving apps being built that would log location data into Geomena for each sniffable wi-fi access point it comes across.

You may be wondering what the need is for wi-fi location sensing when so many smartphones and laptops have GPS built in. But consider how unreliable GPS becomes once you move indoors — it isn’t always an option in an office building, inside an apartment, or in highly congested urban areas. Also, for the near future at least, there will be a class of mobile and tablet devices that don’t have GPS. They will continue to rely solely on wi-fi for location sensing. The cheapest iPad (which will probably be the biggest seller) falls into this category.

If you live in Portland, you can make Geomena your location provider in Firefox right now. If you live outside of Portland, that won’t do you much good. So build an app that adds your local wi-fi nodes to the system. Water the garden, see what grows.

See Also:

• Where 2.0: SimpleGeo to Launch ‘iTunes for Geodata’
• Location Isn’t Just a Feature Anymore, It’s a Platform
• Kickball Plots Foursquare Domination With Better Maps

SAN JOSE, California – If you’re building an app that incorporates location — whether it’s a game, a local search service, or even a Twitter client — you’re going to have to go somewhere to get your data.

As we noted Tuesday, location is now an application platform, and there’s a whole crop of location data stores opening up to serve the emerging market of applications.

SimpleGeo is the latest such company to join the scrum. The web startup is announcing the debut of its geodata service here at Where 2.0 on Wednesday afternoon, but Jenna Wortham of The New York Times leaked the news a little early.

From the NYT Bits blog:

The company has been working to create what he describes as “iTunes for geodata.” The idea is simple: Create a wide sampling of geographic datasets and technologies that developers can access free or, for heavier users, at a range of prices. [...]

The company offers two tools. The first is the SimpleGeo Marketplace, which gives developers access to different location datasets and technologies for a monthly fee. The second is called the SimpleGeo Storage Engine and allows developers to perform location queries on a pay-as-you-go basis.

To gather its data, SimpleGeo began consuming datastreams from Twitter, Gowalla, Foursquare, Brightkite, Flickr and other location-sharing web services.

The pay-as-you-go model will work well for SimpleGeo, which allows the first million API calls for free, according to TechCrunch. Prices then start at $300 for the next level and go up from there. The company claims to have over 4,000 partnered developers using its service.

See Also:

• Location Isn’t Just a Feature Anymore, It’s a Platform
• Kickball Plots Foursquare Domination With Better Maps
• Where 2.0: Video Tracks a Year of Edits on OpenStreetMap

The O'Reilly Where 2.0 Conference runs through Thursday in San Jose, California.

Just when you thought the swell of popularity around location-based services has hit the high water mark, the tide keeps rising.

All of the major web search engines are location-aware. Twitter has its own geocoder and Facebook is including location data in status updates. The big photo-sharing services like Flickr and Picasa support geotagging. Social location apps from Foursquare and Yelp are all the rage, and augmented reality is being touted as the next big thing. The emerging HTML5 specification has its own geolocation controls that let webapps find a user’s location through the browser.

We’ve reached the point where the addition of location data inside an application isn’t a special “bells-and-whistles” add-on, an experimental feature or a layer that’s only useful to some users.

It’s a standard feature now, and it’s crept into every product we care about.

“Location is something that people are just going to expect from now on,” says Brady Forrest, program chair for the O’Reilly Where 2.0 conference, the three-day event about all things location-based taking place in San Jose, California this week.

The location revolution was fueled by the proliferation of geo-enabled devices, Forrest says. Since most of us are carrying GPS devices in our pockets (every iPhone and Android phone has one, and most notebooks, too), it’s created a whole new application platform on which companies from different sectors — search, mapping, gaming, social networking, location-sharing — can compete.

“The platform is here,” he says. “Now, people are finding new ways to exploit it.”

Behind the scenes, there’s also a vibrant new market around web services for location-based apps. Cloud-based services like SimpleGEO, GeoAPI, Yahoo GeoPlanet and Skyhook are powering the most popular of the location-based apps we’re running on our phones and on our desktops.

Several of these companies will be at Where 2.0, along with Google, Microsoft, Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp, Twitter — a who’s who of location-aware players. The three-day schedule — which features break-out sessions for developers on Tuesday, then two days of plenary on Wednesday and Thursday — includes discussions, panels and presentations from all the big names.

One of the most exciting things we’ve seen emerge from Where 2.0 over the years is the increasing importance of open source mapping systems like OpenStreetMap and OpenGEO. Such factors as the recent earthquakes in Haiti and Chile, the emerging mobile markets in developing countries in Africa and Asia, and the recent data transparency movement within our own U.S. government has proven the need for such crowdsourced and community-driven geodata services. They give anyone, anywhere the ability to get accurate place data and build it into applications quickly and easily, either for free or at a low cost.

Webmonkey will be at Where 2.0 Wednesday, March 31 and Thursday, April 1. Look for our coverage right here on the blog under the Location category.

See Also:

• Kickball Plots Foursquare Domination With Better Maps
• Where 2.0: Video Tracks a Year of Edits on OpenStreetMap
• OpenStreetMaps Project Takes Maps in a Different Direction