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How GEOspiro tracks your location....

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A Little Insight to Community based GIS applications.

We live at a time when information is a vital commodity. But the value of any information is determined by timeliness, accessibility, and by our ability to understand and use it. Internet has become a remarkable platform which empowers people, by satisfying any kind of information need on user demand. Spatial data has become one such highly demanding information need and internet provides a unique platform to distribute them. The growth of the internet and increasing demand for geospatial data in various social streams, have lead the way to popular Geographic Information Systems to appear over the past decade.

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are designed to capture, store, manage and present geographical information to assist the users in making better decisions. GIS integrates geospatial services in the cloud bringing together real-time data and user-generated content from mobile devices, applications and social networks. These solutions can support a wide-array of specialized applications for various vertical markets, including public safety, defense, transportation, natural resource management and agriculture, as well as more common needs such as geo-location identification to support CRM and asset management applications, or navigation and global positioning for transport and supply chain management. Participatory GIS (PGIS) is one of the recent trends where the community drives in to. There internet plays a major role, allowing the developers to share, maintain and disseminate the data and give the possibility to expand participatory opportunities to interested parties.

One such application is  foursquare which is a mobile and web application, that allows its registered users to post their location at a venue and connect with friends. This will be appeared as a “check in” and it needs active user selection. Each check in will be awarded with points and users can choose to post them on Facebook or twitter or on both of them. When a user checked into various places, foursquare will offer badges also. Foursquare comes with three user levels to rank the registered users on their contribution to the community.

• Super user level 1 can edit venue info (name, address, cross street, phone, Twitter names, and map pin location), mark venues as open or closed, request venue merges and deletions, and edit venue tags.
•  Super user level 2 can additionally merge duplicate venue listings, adjust the latitude and longitude of a venue, add a web address, and add categories.
• Super user level 3 adds the ability to create and remove venue aliases, as well as access a "global queue" of pending requests needing super user attention.

Foursquare has some marvelous functionalities such as allowing users to create to do lists including the places they want to visit. With their latest release which is foursquare 4.0, they have introduced a new feature called “Radar”. Radar is capable of giving notifications to the user, when he or she is close to a place that’s either on their to-do list or another list they follow or when three or more friends have checked in to a nearby venue.

Foursquare has its own API, so that developers are encouraged to build new applications for foursquare and that may be another reason for their day by day growing popularity. “Where do you go”, “Peek maps”, “Black Book”, “Last Night’s checkins” are some of the applications build upon foursquare API. Foursquare supports for many languages all around the world namely, French, Italian, German, Spanish, and Japanese, Indonesian, Korean, Portuguese, Russian and Thai. It has been released to almost all the popular smart mobile platforms such as Android, Symbian, iPhone, WebOs Windows Phone 7 and BlackBerry.

  While foursquare’s popularity has grown, many other similar applications have come into the competition with remarkable features. Gowalla is one such top alternative to foursquare. Apart from foursquare’s general features, Gowalla rewards users with virtual items when they checked into particular places. These items have become promotional tool for game partners. The location of the user is identified by the GPS hardware in the mobile device or network location provided by the application.  Gowalla features trips, which allow users to link up to 20 related spots, which they can then place into categories. Spots and trips can be featured, which gives a special status, icon, and highlight on the website. Landmarks tend to be featured spots while trips are picked by their uniqueness. Gowalla has released its versions to iPhone, Android, Blackberry and  Palm devices. 

Next concern is about Whrrl. It was recently acquired by  Groupon and its service is not available now. But it is worth mentioning the special features it had, which made it unique among other similar applications. There users were enabled to create their own societies and join available societies based on their interest and places they like to visit. Check ins could be shared to the level they wish. Users could recommend places and post their points of view on others check ins and earn points. Whrrl was available on iPhone. 

Yelp is popular location based social networking application which is available as a web app as well as a mobile app. Users can download it for free for any kind of smart phone which is running on iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows7, and palm. It has a very large online community where by they have created a user reputation system. Therefore every visitor can see most popular, respected and prolific members. Business owners can also communicate with contributors who post reviews on their page via messages or public comments. The site has listings about the places like restaurants, clubs, museums, schools around USA and Canada. Yelp also has a "First to Review" reward system to create a competition among contributing members motivating to post reviews on places.

Koprol is another such application owned by yahoo. People can create an account on koprol and promote their businesses and carry on conversations with their customers. Users can download the mobile version also. App is available for almost all popular mobile platforms. Loopt and Bizzy are similar type of applications that have the same capabilities. There are some applications which diverse the above mentioned geo app series. Weddar is a community powered weather information system. It allows general public to post their comments on weather, based on their location. For example two people in the same city will post different feelings about the weather based on the actual condition. Users can easily get weather information without confusing scientific wordings.
 

Placing the people first is a general philosophy, the developers have followed all the way long in implementing geographic information systems. Emphasizing accessibility in the user interface and developing flexible system architecture are vital facts that affect to output a significant GIS Application.