Location Data on AT Protocol, the second Community Fund project
Announcing the second project under the AT Protocol Community Fund. We're bringing location data to ATProto, with initial funding by Peter Wang's Skyseed Fund.
Foursquare has recently released OS Places, a no-charge, openly licensed high-quality point of interest (POI) data set. There are over 100M+ global POIs in the data set. This has lead to a series of discussions and investigation into what it would mean to bring location data on to AT Protocol. Today we're announcing that location data on AT Protocol is the second project being stewarded by the AT Protocol Community Fund.
This includes the base latitude + longitude geo coordinates, plus businesses and other public venues that have known addresses and locations. With AT Protocol being completely public today, we've scoped an initial set of R&D that focuses on great uses for public data.
Peter Wang at Skyseed has agreed to get us started with an initial donation of $15K, which will allow us to have dedicated developers to ship the basics quickly. This will be a backend commons infrastructure that we know can scale to support many different applications and let developers build interesting high level applications quickly and easily without having to worry about the complexities of running their own backend.
Nick Gerakines and Boris Mann are volunteering their time to support this open source project. The funding will be used to pay for cloud infrastructure as well as paying contributors to the open source project. Nick's Smoke Signal Events will be adopting the venue lexicon and be the first source of location data on the network.
Commons Infrastructure for Location Data
There are four main deliverables:
1) Default venue and geo lexicons: Nick has already been forging ahead with the Lexicon Community in creating a venue lexicon that links Foursquare OS Places identifiers. We'll also develop a basic geo lat/long lexicon. Any app that uses a either of these lexicons will automatically have posts show up in the infrastructure listed below.
2) Foursquare OS Places integration: this is a huge data set, and publishing this directly onto the protocol, potentially owned by just one account, doesn't make sense. This is the bulk of the R&D work where the exact implementation isn't known yet. We'll need to do the following:
- having an ATproto copy of the data
- be able to lazy load data and create AT URIs for it so it can be used as data in venue lexicon fields
- integrate with updates to the upstream data set
3) A venue lookup end point and widget that apps can use: running a hosted endpoint where venues can be looked up as part of creating new posts. This should make it very easy for any developer to make user facing venue addition as part of apps they build.
4) Backend firehose, feeds, and search support, with a default map visualization: initially, just Smoke Signal event posts will have venue and location data. We'll run infrastructure that applications can subscribe to, to get a firehose of location-tagged posts. That will allow for custom feed creation and search that is geo aware. Finally, we'll have a map view for display results on a map. All of this will be to provide default backend infrastructure and default visualization of map data.
We're aiming to ship this over the next 3 months, but there are many more potential features that can be built on top. We're most excited by what developers and users can build on top of this infrastructure. Here are a couple of ideas to get you going.
- Graze Social feeds with location support, so people can build custom, location aware feeds
- Apps that can post content that is "location restricted" – so only visible to people in the Vancouver area, or targeted to Ohio residents
- Third-party app integration – Flashes and Pinksky as Instagram equivalents may want to allow for venue tagging, or Ouranos may continue experimental feature support like location restriction or venue feeds
- "Claiming" venues and connecting them to ATproto accounts
- Various user tools for curated lists of venues for display on maps, e.g. bourbon distilleries in Kentucky
- Integration into other location data sources, like Open Street Map, Mapbox, Overture Maps, etc.
Project Supporters
We're looking for additional funds to do further development, run commons infrastructure for a year, and generally support the growth of apps that work with location-based data on AT Protocol.
This is a project that we're running under the AT Protocol Community Fund. You can read about last week's Community Fund announcement for more info.
Please reach out if you're interested in getting involved, and support us on Open Collective. We've already had an early contributors (thank you Jim!) who found the project before we published this post!
We'll be attending the ATmosphere Conference in Seattle in March, and will be holding a group discussion session about location data on ATproto. Hope to see you there!
