Hyperlocal

I've been speculating for some time that the toolsets to create hyperlocal geospatial data and services will soon be within reach of the people who have an acute interest in that sort of very place-specific knowledge. That is to say, me. And perhaps my neighbors. First, the adoption of building information models (BIM), and CityGML have made it possible to drive geospatial referencing into the architectural and engineering world. Secondly, inexpensive (relatively) GPS receivers have made it possible for the average Jo/e to digitize geographic features of intrinsic importance and thus create geospatial databases of very local features: street trees, neighborhood landmarks, signage, street lights, and so on. With Google as a platform, nowadays literally anyone with a little bit of technical gumption can become a geographer.

I can picture a time not far off when our communities will be tagged, mapped and annotated in any number of different by self-motivated individuals who take an active interest in documenting their communities. I imagine most local governments would love to have data at this level of granularity. But I imagine that it will be way too expensive to collect for the forseeable future. Moreover, most government GIS shops place great emphasis on data quality standards and will need to have some amount of reliable metadata in order make use of these data sets. It may be that if it's an emergency and it's the only data, then the data are going to be better than nothing.

So today Yourstreet announced their launch (or is it a re-launch). Given my interest in the subject, I headed over to the site to check it out. I typed in my zipcode and was given a Google map with a scattering of markers denoting events culled from local news sources using the MetaCarta text-to-gazetteer tools. (I noted that several stories were culled from another town in Texas with the same name.) I can add a news story, start a 'conversation' linked to place (address, city name, or zipcode), and display 'neighbors' -that is, other members in my locality. It's a pretty basic toolset at this point, but perhaps that misses the real point that the average Jo/e now has a place to blog about very place-specific things that matter quite acutely to a very small set of people. The question then becomes: does Yourstreet offer enough inherent value to me that I can begin to posting and create the network effects that will be necessary to sustain Yourstreet (and other similar services)?