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Openlocation.org: Location Services for Web Developers

David Troy (Roundhouse Technologies, LLC)
2:00pm Wednesday, 05/14/2008
Location: Salon A-F

Openlocation.org provides simple and open methods to add location to web applications and to share location-based assets. The site has been a year in the making and aggregates location data from across the social web to provide a unified, open, standards-based location service that is geared specifically to the needs of web application and social media developers.

Built using data and experience gathered from the creation of several location-aware social media sites like Twittervision.com, openlocation.org provides comprehensive name-based geocoding (accounting for the myriad of alternate names and spellings for places), open object registry services that allow developers to publish and query for location-based assets geographically, and a fully editable location database. The site supports REST-based services and the GeoHash, MGRS, and USNG location formats to make working with location data easier for application developers who may be working with location information for the first time.

David Troy will introduce openlocation.org and give a brief tour of its capabilities. Where 2.0 2008 marks the debut of openlocation.org.

David Troy is the chairman and Chief Software Architect of Roundhouse Technologies, and is the creator of Twittervision.com and Flickrvision.com, both currently on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Photo of David Troy

David Troy

Roundhouse Technologies, LLC

David is the founder and chairman of Roundhouse Technologies, a firm specializing in developing technologies surrounding social media and geography. David is a serial entrepreneur and has founded several technology firms including Popvox LLC and ToadNet, Inc, which he sold to Landmark Communications in 2004. David is a longtime contributor to the Asterisk open-source PBX project and has also created plugins for Ruby on Rails. In 2006, he developed an innovative distributed call center technology using Asterisk and Rails which volunteers used to reach out to over 1M voters. In 2007 he created Twittervision.com and Flickrvision.com, which are real-time visual representations of posts to Twitter and Flickr; both are on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Roundhouse will launch openlocation.org, a site geared specifically for web application developers to work with location information, at Where 2.0. David lives with his family near Annapolis, Maryland and enjoys cooking and flying small airplanes.

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