Infochimps Releases Unified Geo Data In One API

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Infochimps’ goal in releasing our Geo API is to democratize the market’s access to a variety of geo data in an easy to digest form.

Austin, TX (PRWEB) August 30, 2011

Infochimps, the leading data-as-a-service provider, today announced the availability of the Infochimps Geo API (geo-spatial application programming interface). The Geo API enables developers to incorporate geographic data sources and features into their software applications by adding a layer of diverse and rich location information. The Geo API provides data from open sources such as Geonames, the National Climatic Data Center and the American Community Survey, as well as licensed sources such as Foursquare and Locationary.

Geographic data has traditionally been difficult to work with due to issues with finding accurate, up-to-date data, the inability to display all results graphically, and limitations in querying by only latitude and longitude. Additionally, many geo data vendors make it difficult to programmatically access their data and require developers to have knowledge of GIS tools and platforms. The Infochimps Geo API provides developers access to a comprehensive, powerful and easy to use data source..

“This is a transformational development for the geo data market,” said Flip Kromer, Co-founder and CTO of Infochimps. “Up until now, developers have faced issues and barriers when working with geo data – everything from the difficulty in finding accurate, up-to-date data to the lack of query-based standards. Infochimps’ goal in releasing our Geo API is to democratize the market’s access to a variety of geo data in an easy to digest form.”

The Geo API delivers an extensive set of features for building social, geo and mapping applications, including:

•          Disparate Data Sources Unified by the Infochimps Simple Schema (ICSS) – Regardless of its original source, data is organized into a unified schema that makes integrating data from multiple sources quick and easy.
•          More Ways To Ask The Questions You Want with Multiple Locator Options – Standard geographic locators like street address, bounding box, quadkey, and latitude/longitude can be used to query any data source in the Geo API. Furthermore, any dimension that can be mapped back to a location, such as a Wikipedia Page ID or Foursquare Venue ID, can also be used to query.
•          Summarizer Tool Allows for Easy Roll-ups of Data – The Summarizer, a unique feature of the Geo API, manages the flood of data when queries return a large amount of matching results. The Summarizer makes data query results more usable by organizing data points into intelligent geographic clusters.

The Geo API release continues Infochimps’ commitment to making data more accessible, while helping to push the market for application development forward through easy access to a rich variety of data sources and APIs, giving developers the ability to focus on building awesome apps.

Liam Dayan, Founder and CEO of the development firm createCORE, says “We’re glad to be working with Infochimps. Their API is making it possible to put some backburner projects back on the near-term roadmap because of how much less work they’ll be.”

The Infochimps Geo API is already being used by a variety of customers, including: AlumniCharger, Foreca.st, createCORE and Nabewise.

To access the Geo API, developers can quickly register for an Infochimps API key and immediately begin building on the data for free, making up to 100,000 free API calls per month.

The Infochimps Geo API is available today with the following data sources:

•     Foursquare
•     Locationary Points of Interest
•     Wikipedia Pages
•     Zillow Neighborhood Boundaries
•     Bundle.com
•     Digital Element
•     US Census
•     American Community Survey 2009
•     National Climate Data Center
•     Geonames
•     Zip Codes
•     Political Boundaries
•     UFO Sightings

Infochimps plans to add additional geographic data sources and features on a regular basis to keep up with customer needs.

For more information visit: http://infochimps.com/apis/geo.

Pricing:

The Infochimps Geo API is included as a part of the existing Infochimps API pricing:

•     Free for up to 100,000 API calls per month
•     $20 per month for 500,000 API calls per month
•     $250 per month for 2 million API calls per month
•     $4,000 per month for 15 million API calls per month

Most APIs do not have additional data charges. However, certain premium data sets (e.g. Digital Element) have additional charges for data returned.

For more information visit: http://www.infochimps.com/apis/features-and-pricing.

About Infochimps:

Infochimps is a leading data-as-a-service provider whose mission is to democratize the world's access to structured data. Initially the brainchild of two graduate physics students at the University of Texas, Infochimps is indexing and connecting the world’s data and making it usable. Infochimp’s cloud-based technology platform sources, queries, and analyzes over 15,000 data sets, allowing our customers to focus on building the next generation of data-driven applications. Infochimps is a privately-held, venture-backed company based in Austin, Texas, with offices in San Francisco, California.

For more information, please visit http://www.infochimps.com or follow @infochimps on Twitter.

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