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