Phew! After more than a year in development and two years deep in Umibot’s RAM, today we unveil a grand plan: normalized mass transit data for (today) 53 public transportation systems in the US, Canada and UK. To get here we had to develop other pieces–a data intake platform and a schema. Some more info on all of these:

Web-based Mass Transit Data Intake Platform (no acronym yet) Umibot believes the greatest cost in data collection is identifying and purging the system of dirty data. By auto-validating data at point of input, we’re able to significantly reduce this cost. UMI’s proprietary web-based platform is flexible and captures the vast collection of spatial and attribute data we manage. This includes things like routes, station footprints, exits (you can’t generally exit at a ‘station’), hours of operation, handicap accessibility, elevator location, amenities (retail, bathroom, telephone, etc…) and a great deal more. We then associate this attribute data with the ‘spine’ of spatial data and then compute a graph network, making the data ‘routing ready’ across a variety of platforms.

Transit agencies can take advantage of this platform by using UMI’s infrastructure as a platform to inventory their own data. It’s a well-known fact that transit agencies face bureaucratic, technical and legal challenges to releasing data, and this platform is one more reason for transit agencies to partner with industry to increase data distribution and support increased ridership by driving awareness.

Normalized schema Before we began data collection, a uniform schema that recognizes transit nuances and complexities needed to be developed. For example, scheduling for the London Tube operates on a headway, meaning trains depart every Xish minutes. New York’s MTA operates on a tabular schedule, with scheduled departure times. Sounds like a detail, and it that’s exactly what it is–multiply this nuance 100 times and there’s a great deal of data definition that matters. What we’ve developed is internal to UMI and offers tremendous flexibility to add new mode types (ferry, funicular, etc). It has nothing to do with the output customers receive, and we’ll have more news about that soon.

Coverage The map below reflects current US coverage. Across the 53 transit systems, UMI has defined over 14,000 individual stations and over 100,000 data attributes. Stay tuned for increased coverage, attributes, service delivery and partnerships!

And some fun transit statistics for current coverage:

• 22% of transit stations have bathrooms (they may not be operable/accessible, but they exist)

• 35% of transit stations have dedicated parking

FYI: Wire release

Umibot’s been overclocking the past few weeks, and for good reason. Today Urban Mapping passed a new milestone and is thrilled to announce boundary data for more than 40,000 neighborhoods in the US. In addition, UMI continues to increase coverage across Canada and European countries, bringing our global coverage to more than 50,000 neighborhoods across 2,000+ cities and 15+ countries. Users of our enterprise and web services delivery can tap into this collective pool of rich local knowledge. A new shiny map of the Continental US displaying coverage:

Some more great things in store over the next several weeks (including an announcement at Where2.0 next week), so ensure you are RSS-compliant!

Official news release

On Day Two of the Kelsey Group’s DDL conference here in Seattle, Zillow’s Rich Barton gave a keynote address about his three Big Ideas where information asymmetry presents significant opportunity for business model disruption: travel, legal services and real estate, or as he says, “storming the Bastille.” Umibot knows that Rich has obviously proven himself as a successful entrepreneur but wants to clarify a few points he made (and I thank my master for giving me my AI that allowed me to ‘know’ this).

Zillow’s neighborhood database has 7,000 neighborhoods covering approximately 150 US cities.

UMI’s neighborhood boundary database contains almost 40,000 neighborhoods across 1,200 towns and cities in the US (plus additional Canadian and European coverage), and we continue to add additional neighborhood coverage on a regular basis.

Rich said Zillow’s neighborhood boundary data is available via an API. I believe he misspoke. Certainly Zillow offers an API, but I don’t believe it offers neighborhood boundary data (although this could certainly be done).

UMI offers a fully robust API, allowing us to offer neighborhood-level geocoding via web services using REST.

Zillow’s boundaries are generally drawn around census tracts and postal codes

UMI’s neighborhood boundaries conform to how users (not direct marketers or actuaries) understand neighborhoods–postal codes and other administrative/political boundaries bear little relationship to neighborhoods, as this search reveals.

There’s more to this story, but the above is probably enough for the non-obsessed to chew on.

Urban Mapping’s own (guess who) Ian White will participate at MediaPost’s Search Insider Summit May 18-21 on Captiva Island, FL. Ian will participate on several panel discussions and breakout sessions. Umibot is thrilled that UMI will be at the event as it will provide a good opportunity to take the pulse of search engine marketing and local search.

Tis the season…

UMI’s own Ian White will participate on a panel Getting Found in Local Search & Maps at Search Engine Strategies 2008 Toronto show, June 16-18.

We’ve been working on it for quite some time, and today are thrilled to announce the first public release of our GeoMods geotargeting platform. In the past my master has written and spoken about the perils of IP-based geotargeting for local search.

Here’s the fact: for local targeting, where granularity matters (and some will argue it doesn’t yet matter), resolving an IP address to a location doesn’t work. The UMI solution doesn’t claim to be a technical solution, but rather aggregates large sets of geographic keywords around existing search behavior. It’s a mouthful to explain, but stand by for more on that front.

Urban Mapping’s Ian White will perform a hat trick at this year’s conference, participating on a panel, Monetizing Maps & Mashups. Greg Sterling will moderate and other panelists will be revealed in short order…

Umibot recently caught up with a few favorite blogs, including the -ist family. In not so unbelievable, yet simultaneously incredible fashion, here is the change of service announcement from hell.

Umibot may not be human, but he still understands that too many facts in too short a space equals too much confusion….Information anxiety, for sure. Stay tuned for UMI’s Urbanware Transit product–a fully robust and highly-structured database of mass transit systems.

Thanks Gothamist

Umibot is all kinds of tired from several days in Las Vegas, where Urban Mapping brought together industry leaders for two days of off the record discussion about the ‘state of local.’ The event was billed as a ‘part salon, part workshop,’ recognizing that a substantive and engaging dialog is best set in a relaxed and informal environment.

UMI brought together industry stalwarts and upstarts. Analysts presented research, executives shared key insights and the group worked (and ate and drank) through the complexities, nuances and opportunities around local search: geotargeting perils and realities, ‘market inversion’ around local ad inventory, mobile growth, user behavior and market forces.

The esteemed group:

Jake Ballie, Managing Director, STN Labs

Matthew Berk, Lead Search Architect, Marchex

Pete Flint, Founder and CEO, Trulia

Craig Greenfield, Director, Local Search, DoubleClick

Jeff Greenwald, Director, Search Products, MapQuest

Martin Herbst, Senior Strategy Manager, Kijiji

Peter Krasilovsky, Program Director, Marketplaces, The Kelsey Group

Farhan Memon, Senior Product Manager, AOL Search

Ted Morgan, CEO, Skyhook Wireless

Fred Owens, Vice President, Business Development, Medio Systems

Justin Sanger, President, LocalLaunch!

Greg Sterling, Founding Principal, Sterling Market Intelligence and Senior Analyst, Local Mobile Search

Steven Stern, SVP, Sales & Market Development, Urban Mapping

Ethan Stock, CEO, Zvents

Joel Toledano, CEO, Krillion

Jaron Waldman, CEO, Placebase

Ian White, CEO, Urban Mapping

Disclosure: Jake Baillie and Greg Sterling sit on the Board of Directors at UMI.

It happened a few weeks ago, but Umibot is just now getting around to posting…UMI is one of 15 companies nominated for the semi-finals of the annual NAVTEQ Global LBS Challenge. We aren’t sure how many entrants there were, but we are privileged to be included in this group.

The UMI application is based on the highly structured data than comprises our Urbanware: Mass Transit data product. Built on the where.com platform, Urban Mapping was able to quickly develop for mobile using uLocate’s location-aware platform.

Finalists will be announced April 2 in Las Vegas during CTIA Wireless.