In our never ending quest to make it as simple as possible for you to search for UK property we’ve created a Google personalised homepage module. Now you can add a property lists or property maps to your start page.
Archive for October, 2006
Last Friday Nestoria was at the Ordnance Survey geo mash-up conference.
The talks ranged from a simple ‘how to’ through to discussions on the best ways to share geographic data and some heated audience debate. Examples ranged from plotting schools on a map to calculating journey times around the country.
There were also two panel sessions where the audience were able to ask questions and differing views were expressed by the panelists. One of the most contentious questions was ‘who will pay’ which resulted in some fairly polarized opinions. One extreme was that the users should pay and that the current free data was not viable long term. The other view was that the content could be free because the cost of delivery was so low and so enabling other revenue streams that were not possible a few years ago.
Representing the ‘new way’ were some engineers from Google who we ate lunch with. It was a good opportunity to thank them for the maps API which has made that part of our job so much easier. There did not appear to be any representatives from Yahoo or Microsoft. MultiMap’s Sean Phelan was there though and gave a talk, laying to rest any doubts that they are being left behind - we’ll be watching their progress very closely in case they can help us.
It was pleasing that Nestoria was mentioned in a few of the talks, mostly for our recent integration of OpenStreetMap and our use of GeoRSS. It was disappointing that there were not more representatives of commercial mash up sites there as it would have helped give a more real world feel. There was a ready acceptance of most of the delegates to facilitate mashups and greater data sharing, but an uncertainty as to what steps should be taken first.
An interesting day with many acquaintances made and renewed. It is great to see this sort of enthusiasm for what we are doing from the Geo community.
It’s funny how, as you grow older and gain experience in the game of life, your perspective on things can change. The passion of youth, the wisdom of age, it’s all part of the delicious human experience. It may be trite, but it’s nontheless true: change is the only constant in life.
And yet, dear Nestoria fan, we’ve noticed that there are a few constants in our journey through time. We’ve noticed that people, no matter how different they may seem to be on the surface, are often searching for the same thing.
It’s to meet these perpetual needs that today we’ve launched a tiny addition to our UK property search engine. We know this will help each of you, wherever you happen to be on your life journey. Starting today we allow you to limit your searches by number of bathrooms.
Nestoria's latest feature - Search by map, is now live!
We know from experience and user-testing that quite often, a user has a particular area in mind when looking for property - an area which perhaps can't be defined by a simple term such as "(properties in) Hammersmith" or "(properties to) rent in W6" - it is perhaps an area in-between two roads, or a little further north-east than the properties provided from such a search.
Wouldn't it be great to drag the map about until you find an area you want to see the properties in, click a button and have them appear? That's exactly what search by map lets you do!
- Drag the map to an area you want to view properties in
- Above the map:
will change to: 
- When you're happy with the area you're looking at, click on the "re-centre your search" button
- Rinse and repeat until you find your dream residence
If you're still not sure what on earth is going on, take a look at the video above. It's a short clip of someone searching by map on the Nestoria site.
Go and try it now and let us know what you think.
Those readers attending this week’s ITAB2006 (Information Technology Application in Biomedicine) conference in Ioannina, Greece, may run into Spiros Denaxas, one of the software developers here at Nestoria.
By day, Spiros spends his time here at Nestoria working on things like local content (all those pretty pins you see on the map), natural language processing (more on this the next time we update you on some recent improvements to Nestoria Rank), and our internal metrics and analysis systems. But by night, while the rest of us sleep or hoist a pint after a hard day’s work, Spiros toils diligently on his PhD in bioinformatics. In short: he’s an intellectual monster.
Spiros’ hard work has paid off, and he’s recently had some of his research accepted for publication. He’ll be presenting his paper on “Quantifying the Biological Similarity between Gene Products Using GO: An Application of the Vector Space Model” at the conference. Read the details of Spiros’ research and the abstract of this paper specifically over on Spiros’ blog.
If you’re in Ioannina, please say hello.
Which is the smallest ceremonial county in Britain, yet has the largest parliamentary constituency?
The answer is (of course) the Isle of Wight. Located just off the South coast of England it is quite a special place, and not just because of the Wikipedia provided trivia above. In May 2006 a swarm of mapping enthusiasts (organized by OpenStreetMap) descended on “The Island” to map it out using handheld GPS units. By walking, cycling and driving all the roads and paths that they could they captured all the data that was needed to create a detailed map.
We are now delighted that, as an experiment, when you search for Isle of Wight property on Nestoria we display maps generated by this effort. For example, properties to buy in Cowes.
For Nestoria this is an interesting chance to be part of an innovative proof of concept. As backers of open source software and the geohacker community, we were happy to help when some members of the OpenStreetMap team approached us about being part of this demo. Volunteer mapping is in it’s infancy, but holds the promise of more up to date data and could be a great tool to cost effectively map parts of the developing world. Nevertheless, this is an experiment, we have no plans to switch away from the high quality maps and satellite photos provided by Google Maps.
Speaking of Google, we want to say a big “thank you” for their brilliant Google Maps API. The API, or programmatic interface, (which we use for the maps on Nestoria) makes this sort of experimentation and innovation possible. It’s the same technique that we used to give you tube lines in London.
Google’s been great about continually extending and improving the API and working with developers to allow innovation to flourish. Equally, we’d like to thank all the folks in the global online mapping community who’ve been brilliant about providing tips, feedback, and generally inspired us. The community is a big one with many contributors, but we’d like to single out the following sites for their help and inspiration: Cool Google Maps, Google Maps Mania, Mapping Hacks, Mikel Maron’s Brainoff, OpenGeoData, and nearby.org.uk.
It will be interesting to see where these experiments lead. The pace of new development in online mapping has really acccelerated in the last few years, and we’re excited that Nestoria can play a small part. Already we are thinking of other interesting overlays that we could add that might help you choose your dream home. One that springs to mind is a night time satellite photo - so that you can see what sort of light pollution you can expect. If you have any other ideas please send us feedback or leave a comment.
Update: read OSM’s point of view directly over at opengeodata.org
A few of us will be attending the UK Geospatial Mash-Up Conference in Southampton this Friday. The event is sponsored by the AGI, the OGC, the BCS, and the Ordnance Survey (OS). The very full agenda features speakers from notable upstarts like OpenStreetMap, familiar stalwarts like MultiMap, and everyone’s favourite 800 pound gorilla - Google Maps. It should be an exciting collision of different projects, people, and perspectives.
We look forward to chatting with the other attendees and are interested in hearing comments and ideas about our website, developer API, drop-in maps, GeoRSS feeds, or whatever else is on your mind. Nestoria will have some space in the demonstration area to show off our work and are sponsoring a contest involving…you guessed it…maps and property. Please drop by to say hello and to try your hand at a little game. The first prize is very nice, and definitely topical.
The most common feedback we get here at Nestoria is that users really enjoy what we’ve done with maps, particularly the ability to overlay data about a specific locations (transport, schools, pubs, shops, etc.).
Thanks. We’re pleased we’ve been able to do some interesting things with online maps to make searching for a property easier. (And a big thanks to Google for making it all possible).
But then we also thought “Why keep this all to ourselves?” Why not give internet users a way to paste a map directly onto their own web pages?
And so today we proudly present the Nestoria DropIn Map. Any webmaster can now, with a simple bit of cut and paste, add a fully interactive map of property and other local services to his or her website. We think this is a great way to provide highly relevant content to your users.
See a live example:
On Monday evening I’ll be part of a panel discussion about “creating innovative web applications and services” at the London Internet People entrepreneurs event set up by Robert Loch. The lineup looks great, and if last month’s event is any guide it should be a most enjoyable evening.
If you’re there please introduce yourself. I’d love to hear your thoughts on Nestoria - what are we doing well and what could we do better.
If you can’t make it this time, try hard to make it to the next one (though you can, of course, still send us your feedback).
See you there.
Nestoria opensource fans,
as recently promised we’re pleased to announce yesterday’s release of WebService::Nestoria::Search, a Perl module for interacting with the Nestoria API.
Written by our former intern, Alex Balhatchet, the module makes it dead simple for anyone using Perl to experiment with our database. So no more excuses Perl programmers, if you’ve always wanted to make an interesting UK geomashup, have at it. On a related note, Perl fans in general may be interested in another module that has come out of the Nestoria development experience - Spiros Denaxas’ URI::ParseSearchString. We hope to announce another module of interest to the geo community in the coming weeks.
Alex’s module follows on the announcement a few weeks ago of a Python interface to the API.
For questions about the API or about Nestoria in general, please get in touch.
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