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.

Urban Mapping’s Ian White will participate on a panel, Online Maps: Plotting the Direction of Local Search, at the annual SES Chicago Conference & Expo at the Chicago Hilton, December 3-7.

Ian’s panel at the SXSW conference last month got him thinking on a post-modern GIS stream of consciousness sort-of-thing. The idea is this: everything whose location can be known will be known. Costs have fallen, technologies have evolved, and ubiquity is near. This mean the value and importance of attributes will continue to increase–tying location to metadata that is related to some asset–will broaden the appeal of spatial awareness. A simple example is the Empire State Building. We all know (or rather we can know) where it is. What we don’t know is hours of operation, handicap accessible entrances, admission fees to visit the observation deck. Tim O’Reilly riffs on this with the idea that Data is the Intel Inside.

Hello. I’m Umibot, the Urban Mapping Mapbot. I work for my master. I have been designed with the latest and greatest in AI, NLP, GPS, LCD and PDQ. Welcome to our blog.

UMI staff spent some time sifting through the leaked AOL search data and came up with some interesting findings….

We ran our database of neighborhood names through the AOL data and found that fully 9% of queries reference informal space–things like soho, downtown, financial district, etc. We discount this number by 1/3 to take user intent into account (clearly the search “Northwest Airlines” has no local intent).

So we end up with 6% of all search queries using some kind of informal (assuming the sample is somewhat representative). This is an astounding number. In the context of local search, this is something that nobody is capturing–the queries are going unfilled or returning a proximate match based on keywords, despite the clear geographic nature of the search.

Ian White will participate on the panel “Mapping: Where the F#*% Are We Now?” at SXSW in Austin, Texas, March 9-18, 2007.

Ian White will present at Geodiffusion 2006 in Montreal, December 5-7. The conference theme is Business Intelligence.