An Australian geospatial web start-up company has created a deceptively simple way to adapt physical addresses to the Web. ProjectX co-founder Ben Nolan presented the idea at the recent Where 2.0 conference in San Jose.
For example, the Where 2.0 conference was at the Fairmont Hotel, 170 Market Street, San Jose, Santa Clara County, California. Zopto (the ProjectX name for the technology) turns that physical description into a web address:
... /ca/santa+clara/san+jose/market+street/170
If preceeded by the right Web coordinates, a map of the location would appear on the Zopto web site. Registered users of the Zopto site can add bookmarks or upload photos related to specific physical addresses.
The company is creating the Zopto network as a platform for providing physical location identity for online data. It does so by providing a unique URL for a physical address. To this Zopto adds a community-mapping site which Nolan claims can be easily extended by third party developers. The map technology is courtesy of Google Maps and its free and open API (application programming interface). The result is an example of what is called a mashup, meaning the combination of web-based geospatial sites like Google Maps with another application and user-supplied data to create a custom result in real time.
The project is still in preview mode; the system worked fine once while I was testing it for this article, then became unavailable. For now Zopto only works for Australia, New Zealand, and the US states of California and Washington. They have a plan to adapt the Zopto system to countries where addresses are not numbered, such as Japan and India, but have not yet made the idea public.
More information at the Zopto web site.
--RSN
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