November 1

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Contents

Editor's Introduction

This week, I report on some of the ways of advertising on online maps, profile a company that is beginning to sell ad space on map tiles, and host a guest article about data quality. Plus, 14 press releases.

— Matteo Luccio

Advertising on Online Maps

Online mapping sites and virtual globes are the latest growth area for advertising. The options include:

• using Google's AdWords to place ads on Google Maps
• using third-party software to overlay ads onto maps (three companies that specialize in aggregating ads and placing them on user mapping sites are Safarri, Mappam, launched in late June, and Lat49, launched about a month ago)
• using Google Earth's animation capabilities to "fly" website visitors to stores, dealerships, etc. near them (for various examples, click here)
• painting logos on the roofs of buildings (this technique initially targeted airplane passengers)
• creating 3D models of headquarters buildings
• placing virtual billboards (see Bright GIS).

A few questions come to mind:

• Will new companies like Lat49, Safarri, and Mappam be able to build a sufficiently large advertiser network to achieve critical mass?
• Will Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and other providers of online maps allow these third parties to monetize their mapping platforms?
• Will online maps and virtual globes become cluttered with advertising?
• Will the placement of virtual billboards and other such artifacts make it hard to distinguish between what exists in the physical world and what exists only in a virtual one?

Google Earth has had ads since the beginning of 2006. You only see them if you search for a product or a service in a city for which Google has business address information. The ads appear under some of the listings that appear on the map, when you select them, and they don't interfere with the user experience of browsing Google Earth. On maps of U.S. cities, these ads are very unobtrusive, for now, and if you have the Plus version you can turn them off. However, the map of Tokyo on Google Maps displays many logos — for 7Eleven, McDonald's, ampm, etc. Is that what the future holds for the United States as well?

By contrast, for now, MapQuest and Yahoo! Local only place contextual ads around their maps, but not on them. When you search for businesses on Microsoft's Live Search Maps, the listings appear to the side of the map, linked to a numbered marker on the map. However, Microsoft has also rolled out ads inside Virtual Earth 3D for major sponsors, such as Nissan and Fox. (Google hopes that its purchase of DoubleClick Inc., which helps place graphical ads for customers, and YouTube, the video site it acquired last year, will help it make gains on Microsoft and Yahoo! Inc. in display advertising.)

At least two recent U.S. patent applications have been filed with regard to displaying ads on maps. Google filed one last December, which was published in June, titled "Determining advertisements using user interest information and map-based location information." Another one was filed at the beginning of this month.

Lat49 Begins to Sell Ad Space on Map Tiles

Lat49 is a project of Idelix Software, a company founded in 2001 with a focus on user-interface technology. Based in Vancouver, Canada, Idelix has a staff of about 20. I discussed Lat49's technology and business model with Chloe Morrow, Vice President of Operations, who manages the company's development team.

1. Is Lat49 essentially a mash-up?

   It is not any more a mash-up than traditional online advertising models are. Ads that are geotagged in our database can be served up on top of the map or besides the map if that is more appropriate for the particular publisher site. We are taking advantage of the fact that on a site that has a map component we know where the user is looking geographically and therefore can serve ads that are targeted and relevant to that particular geographic area.

2. How do advertisers purchase space on a map?

   They purchase the advertising rights for their creative material for map tiles — regions at particular zoom levels — by pointing and clicking on a map view to select the tiles.

    

3. How do you deliver the ads?

   On our website, we have a Javascript DPI that publishers incorporate into their sites. They send us just the lat-long and scale of where the user is currently looking and we return the appropriate ad for that lat-long and scale. Typically, publishers might hook up a change command on some event handler; so, for example, on a map pan they need to trigger a new call to serve the appropriate ad for the new lat-long and scale that the user is looking at.
    

4. How do publishers make money from your ads?

   We share 50 percent of our advertising revenue with our publisher network. The amount that any one particular site makes depends on the amount of traffic that it generates across our network.

5. How many have signed up thus far?

   Tiffany Chester, Director of Marketing & Business Development, answered this question: In the first two weeks of being up we had roughly 30 publishers sign up. It takes some time to get this up in their live environment, so about one third of them are actually live right now. Our numbers will increase rapidly over the next two months.
    

6. Do the ads interfere with the maps? Can users move them?

   The ads usually appear in the lower right-hand corner of the maps. Users can't move them out of the way, but they are positioned in such a way that they are not obscuring the main view of the map.

7. What's new about your system?

   What we are doing differently from traditional sites, besides the geo-targeting, is that we are updating the ads as the user interacts with the maps. Traditional banner advertising does not do that, so you are not getting as much potential for revenue when you are just displaying a static set of ads on the page for a long time. For example, if you look at bikely.com, it has a banner ad at the top and some Google ads down the right hand side. While these ads are bike-related, they are not geographically related to the area of the map that you are looking at. The other problem is that, as I interact with the map — pan, zoom, etc. — I am now looking at some other area. That's a great opportunity for local businesses or brands in that area to place ads that are targeted to that geographic region. In the bikely.com example, the ads on the right will not change the entire time that I am playing with this map. The way that Google ads work, this publisher will only get paid if I click on one of these ads. They are not changing, so the potential for this site to make money decreases the longer that you are playing with the site and you are not doing a full page refresh. [By contrast, with our system] as I move the map around, the ads will change dynamically. This provides a great opportunity for advertisers to advertise in a very targeted way.

8. What's your company's background?

   Our founder invented a core technology that was focused on making sure that users could easily see and de-clutter rich data. A lot of that applicability happened in a map environment. So, we were doing a lot of work in different kinds of geospatial contexts. We worked on that technology in a variety of different platforms, such as Java and C. As the interest in maps in online environments grew, we also began to showcase some of our core technology in an online environment. We built a map site that used this technology and began to look at how we could monetize it. So, our Lat49 technology is a bit different from what the company had been doing traditionally, but we re-used a lot of our expertise and knowledge in geospatial area and in clean, easy-to-use interfaces both on the publisher site and on the sign-up side.

9. How do you gather ads?

   We have a three-pronged approach to growing the advertising pie. We have a direct sales team that targets specific advertisers that we think would suit the kind of publisher sites that we have. We have a referral program: this is the viral element. We are also working with some larger ad brokers who have an existing inventory of ads, so that we can allow them to resell our ad space or re-direct ads to third parties. Lat49 is really two things: a technology as well as a network.

10. How else do you plan to use your technology?

    We are looking at the possibility of white-labeling our technology for companies that want to field the display ads on their site, but want to be able to brand it as their own ad-serving technology. Obviously, down the road, the growth area for us is mobile and location-based advertising. With the proliferation of GPS-enabled devices, there is going to be huge value in being able to deliver ads targeted to where the user physically is.

11. Did you need to negotiate any agreements with Google, Yahoo!, MapQuest, etc.?

    Our engine is map-agnostic: all we are taking is lat-long and scale, so it doesn't really matter what the underlying map is. In fact, there doesn't even have to be a map, it could be just an address. Also, if you look at the terms of service of all those sites, they all allow for advertising. That's the purpose of those consumer-based APIs. We are showing ads on top of the map, but there is also advertising being shown on the site, so it is quite common for these map sites to be making revenue related to the map component of their site.

12. Could a publisher choose to place your ads off the map?

    Yes, but what we really wanted to do was to allow for the ads to be shown on the map. If someone already has ads on their site and they want to add ours, that's fine.

OGC Focuses on Data Quality

Guest article by Steven Ramage, Business Development Director at 1Spatial, who wrote it for Network, the newsletter of the Geospatial Information & Technology Association (GITA)

Data quality is a massive concern for those involved in information technology and the software business globally. The Data Warehousing Institute estimated that data quality problems cost U.S. businesses more than $600 billion per year.1 Closer to home for those working with spatial data, PIRA (Commercial Exploitation of Europe's Public Sector Information, 20002) estimated that in 1999 it would cost the European Community countries 36 billion Euros to replace its geographical information assets. This amount was estimated to be growing at 4.5 billion Euros per annum. Similar costs for the United States were estimated at $375 billion with a $10 billion growth per annum! These figures will almost certainly have accelerated in the aftermath of 9/11, with the focus on homeland security and geospatial intelligence. The increased emphasis and activity around Spatial Data Infrastructures is also driving a number of regional and national activities using geographical information assets or geospatial data, and its interaction with non-spatial or 'regular' data.

Many organizations invest significant sums in collecting these geospatial data. The demand for the 00 decade is for joined-up decision-making. In a geospatial context, geometric data quality deserves as much attention as alphanumeric data quality. Typically, most organizations spend many years collecting spatial data and integrating or conflating (merging together) their own data with third party reference data. By third party data we mean states or regions in the United States using TIGER data with their own asset data, or Local Authorities in Great Britain using Land-Line or OS MasterMap in conjunction with gazetteer information. After such a large initial investment, ensuring high quality spatial data is essential in order to achieve value from the investment.

There are numerous reasons why spatial data may not meet user expectations. For example:

• the use of GPS has introduced a more rigorous accuracy for reference data sets
• GIS installations are only just beginning to understand the importance of metadata and configuration management
• transformations alter information
• lack of understanding or recognition that data may be inaccurate
• data duplication — the same dataset is held by different departments but is rarely synchronized or even shared
• conflation is only just becoming widespread in response to industry initiatives.

Taking these considerations into account, a draft Charter was submitted to the Open Geospatial Consortium with a view to establishing a Data Quality Working Group.3 The Mission of this group was set: "To establish a forum for describing an interoperable framework or model for OGC Quality Assurance Web Services to enable access and sharing of high quality geospatial information, improve data analysis, and ultimately influence policy decisions." The Working Group will define a framework and grammar for the certification and communication of spatial data quality.

In order to build the framework or model for OGC Quality Assurance Web Services, it is necessary to ascertain what organizations involved in the marketplace currently understand and mean when using the term spatial data quality. The method to describe and communicate spatial data quality measures will reference these categories below:

• completeness
• accuracy
• positional (in respect of re-using spatial data collected before GPS)
• thematic — integrity — definition (for semantic interoperability)
• consistency
• validity & classification
• language
• projection
• scale
• temporality.

Reference shall also be made to the standards defined in ISO 19113, 19114 and 19113(8) when published.4 ISO 19115 metadata standards may be relevant in the storage of such measures and quality descriptors. Hopefully these methods will become a quality assurance-type guide for users of spatial data.

To facilitate these objectives, the Data Quality Working Group has compiled a survey that is open to the entire geospatial community and wider IT industry using spatial data. We encourage you to participate in this unique opportunity to provide feedback on spatial data quality, in terms of your views on the issues you see in the marketplace today. The survey can be found here.

For the purposes of the survey, spatial data quality is defined as a measure of spatial data's relative fitness for the user's intended purpose. There are several reasons why it is important to determine spatial data quality requirements in terms of fitness for purpose or use. For example:

• legislative and regulatory requirements
• improved and more valid decision making
• cost reduction through operational efficiency gains
• maximizing return on your investment in spatial data
• poor public image and customer perception
• increased profits through better business intelligence
• re-use of public sector information.

Value is attributable if the data allow decisions to be taken with a given confidence. Confidence can be measured through assessing fitness-for-purpose. The next steps are to develop a framework to allow confidence to be stated. Therefore, please take this unique opportunity in this industry-wide collaboration and help to shape the future of how spatial data is perceived, measured, and ultimately assists in improving business processes for all.

Steven Ramage is Business Development Director at 1Spatial, where he has responsibility for their international partner network, the 1Spatial Community. He was involved in drafting the Charter for the Open Geospatial Consortium Data Quality Working Group, and is a contributor to the current survey. The DQ WG is currently chaired by Graham Stickler from 1Spatial and co-chaired by Patrick Cunningham from Blue Marble Geographics.

References

1 "Data Quality and the Bottom Line," Wayne Eckerson, The Data Warehousing Institute, 2002.

2 Pira International Ltd., University of East Anglia, and KnowledgeView Ltd. 2000. Commercial exploitation of Europe's public sector information. Final report for the European Commission Directorate General for the Information Society.

3 Open Geospatial Consortium Data Quality Working Group

4 Data Quality Challenges in 2007, Dr Michael Sanderson, 1Spatial, January 18, 2007

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