Fourth, we're detecting geography in narratives -- "blobs," so to speak -- and making it easy for people to find relevant news articles and government documents that refer to specific places near them. Some examples are New York City news articles, San Francisco zoning agenda items and Chicago city press releases. Another (geeky) way to phrase this is that we're harvesting geographic metadata from unstructured text.

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On the map side, we've made our own maps, deciding against Google's or Yahoo's map offerings for a number of reasons; that took a sophisticated combination of design, coding and data chops. At the technical level, we've developed an array of technology just to get all of this data into an elegant, unified system. It's beautiful. And we've even done a fair amount of manual labor, from hand-drawing neighborhood boundaries to hand-tagging newspaper articles to train our geoparsing algorithms.

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We're obligated under the terms of our Knight grant to release the site's code under an open-source license at the end of the grant period.