Thursday, May 24, 2012

Carbon Project Demos Mobile App for Updating Geonames


The Carbon Project recently demonstrated our Android app that makes updating geographic names easy – and it’s based on open standards for interoperability.

In the demo we showed how the CarbonCloud app lets Android users propose updates to over 2.5 million geographic names. The app works by letting users get geonames for any area of the United States - and if they see a needed update they can submit it with just a few clicks.  Updates are sent to the CarbonCloud Sync geosocial networking service (and can be reviewed if needed). The app service can also send the updates out to many online services at the same time – thanks to open standards from OGC like WFS-G. This is unlike many systems today which store data in just one database. The demo above uses WFS-G provided by CubeWerx and geonames data from the US Geological Survey.

We also sent the app out to beta testers who were able to load it and get started immediately (without consulting any of the app user guides - which a good test for the average user. I mean, who really reads directions for an app anyway ;-).  Some of the beta testers comments included -  

- 'Easy and intuitive navigation of the map' 

- 'Creating a new feature was easy and fairly intuitive' 

- 'Overall,  a very neat app'

  
Let us know if you want to give it a try.

- Jeff