Map Scripting

The Geomena Project is creating a database of WiFi IDs and geographic coordinates. It’s sort of a structured wiki in that anyone can add new points or update previous ones. The real fun comes in querying it to determine location based on the WiFi networks nearby. I’m thrilled to be joining Don Park on this project.

WiFi geolocation is moving towards ubiquity in the browser. Firefox 3.5 comes pre-installed with the ability for users to share their location and other browsers are adding it. Thanks to standards, the same code that works in Firefox also lets you get the latitude and longitude of your iPhone, for example. However, the underlying data is closed and cannot be updated or appended. Geomena is looking to open this up, available for anybody.

I’ve known Don for several years, as our paths have crossed in the open source, public WiFi and geo communities. Geomena is a great opportunity for us to blend all three. There is a lot to do to make it easy to contribute to the database, as well as benefit from it by geolocating users. We’ve discussed browser plugins, location games and a read/write API. If the project interests you, we’d welcome collaboration. I’ll likely post some here about it, and you can follow more updates at geomena.org.