Adopting the GeoDict Open Source Project

Ushahidi
Jan 26, 2011

It goes without saying that we rely upon location pretty heavily here at Ushahidi. SwiftRiver's mandate is to help users process and validate data. For Ushahidi users, applying geospatial context to content that doesn't carry it (like SMS, news articles, blog posts, in some cases Tweets) has proved tedious, with questionable results. For this reason and more, Team Swift is currently focused heavily on location disambiguation and integrating data processing APIs into Ushahidi.

To do this we're using techniques described in this post, to reverse query a database with place names coupled with their geospatial coordinates. Currently, Swift uses Yahoo Placemaker to do this, but much like Ushahidi, Swift is a free an open source project and, that said, we like to ensure that the components of our systems are also free and open source. We came across the GeoDict project while looking for an alternative to Yahoo's Place maker and we're excited to announce that our open source communities will be working together to integrate GeoDict's existing code and roadmap into Swift's. Followers of the Swift project will recognize that GeoDict is replacing our SULSa project, which we simply didn't have the internal capacity to build out.

An excerpt from the announcement at the SwiftRiver blog...

What does this mean?

We're not sure entirely, but there are some things we do know.  Both projects will remain available under the GPL. You'll see us contribute our staff, time and resources to the development of GeoDict (because it's an open source project aligned with our greater mission). GeoDict's community will also actively contribute back to that code, and hopefully they'll feel welcome enough that they'll also contribute to SwiftRiver and Ushahidi code base as well.

GeoDict will be fully integrated into the Swift Web Services family of API products which we offer as both free and paid services, but also as open-source code for anyone out there to use on their own terms.

Big thanks to Pete Warden for creating GeoDict and for supporting our project. Welcome to the Ushahidi family!

Read More at Swiftly.org