SwiftRiver is an opensource project with the overarching goal to help people make sense of data on their terms. We do this by adding all types of elusive context to content: tags, predictions for accuracy, indicators of influence and location etc.
Location is incredibly important to us because one of our many objectives is to help users verify data and location often serves as a clue about whether content is accurate or not. For example, in this post Vladimir Ermakov describes how Swift attempts to auto-detect the location news articles refer to using statistical analysis of text. That algorithm needs a database of locations to work, however.
Particularly in the case of crisis-mapping, this is key. In applications like the Ushahidi platform, people can aggregate ‘reports’ about events and visualize that data geo-spatially. Because that data comes from the crowd, and because it all needs to be location based (for visualization), it’s critical that the location appended to the message be accurate…or at least as accurate as possible.
So contextualizing crowdsourced data through location is a huge priority. Another priority is ensuring that our platform work relatively the same offline as it might online. This means we want to ensure that our products rely primarily upon other open source projects whose source code can be deployed on a local machine or behind a firewall.
Recently we realized we were beginning to rely upon Yahoo’s Placemaker service for our location detection features. Yahoo is great, but to rely upon such a huge, proprietary product cripples the access for some users. We spent several months thinking about building our own alternative (see: SULSa), but ultimately it proved beyond our resources. So we set out to find an opensource alternative to Placemaker and we found one in the form of the GeoDict project.
GeoDict is an opensource project for pulling location information from unstructured text. Given our recent experiments in this same area, we found a the GeoDict project inspiring. So although it was an active project with a growing community, we invited the people behind it to allow SwiftRiver to officially adopt the codebase.
What does this mean?
We’re not sure entirely, but there are some things we do know. Both projects will remain available under the GPL. You’ll see us contribute our staff, time and resources to the development of GeoDict (because it’s an open source project aligned with our greater mission). GeoDict’s community will also actively contribute back to that code, and hopefully they’ll feel welcome enough that they’ll also contribute to SwiftRiver and Ushahidi code base as well.
GeoDict will be fully integrated into the Swift Web Services family of API products which we offer as both free and paid services, but also as open-source code for anyone out there to use on their own terms.
Big thanks to Pete Warden for creating GeoDict and for supporting our project. Welcome to the Ushahidi family!
