deCarta and Data

Old data

We saw a history of data from census to today. The valuable point I took away is about POIs, which are now big business:

Static POIs - things that don't move much (airports, public buidlings)
Commercial POIs - businesses (restaurants and hotels, volitile)
Dynamic POIs - change regularly (restaurant reservation options, gas prices, very volatile, often via feeds)

New data we can expect

Multi-modal navigation – that is using walking, driving, cycling, etc.
Advanced map display – improve orientation of user to the real world via 2D/3D/etc.
Weather for visualization and traffic prediction

New at deCarta

Rich Map Customizer (RMC) – a tool to “roll your own RMF” data. It’s a hosted Web service where you upload the data and deCarta ships it to you. Alternatively, you can do the processing on your own machines. The benefits include updating just specific geographies or specific content. This will be available in Dec 2007. There’ll also be an optional extension that creates UDM deCarta data from initially shape files, but other data sets in the future. That data can then go into RMC. That’ll be available in January.

The New DevZone

Why you should love it:
No risk, nothing to install, prototype quickly, latest version available, don’t have to talk to sales people or data vendors, communicate with other developers

It’s not:
For making money, a replacement for tech support, you can’t customize your map style, no access to DDSQL (Drill Down SQL), not for more than 100K transactions

Extra good stuff: You can prototype here and then move to production (Maps.com did for Sprint store locator). And, it’s been updated including a “getting started” outline. There are new discussion forums – available in RSS or via e-mail! Docs are live on the site (no need to download PDFs.) All samples are live. The FAQ is now an editable wiki.

[Disclosure: deCarta covered my travel and lodging for this event.]