BlinkGeo » An Interview with a Geospatial Startup: WeoGeo

6thOctober

An Interview with a Geospatial Startup: WeoGeo

Amazon’s S3 and EC2 web services are starting to garner more attention as a viable means for companies/organizations to leverage Amazon’s robust infrastructure to store and deliver content via the web. I first came across WeoGeo via this post on BlinkGeo Stories. WeoGeo is a Florida-based startup that has tapped into these two web services to host/deliver various types of geospatial content in a promising new way. Many thanks to WeoGeo’s two founders, Dr. W. Paul Bissett and Dr. David D.R. Kohler, who were kind of enough to provide the following information about their new venture.

Give us the equivalent of your 30-second elevator pitch for WeoGeo?
WeoGeo is a platform for the hosting, discovery, and marketing of geospatial content. At its heart is technology that matches people with geocontent in a way that eases the process of customizing and delivery high bandwidth digital products.

The technology is used in two distinct, yet linked, ways. WeoGeo Market (http://www.WeoGeo.com) provides an exchange based approach to matching the suppliers of digital geocontent (our Providers) with the consumers of those products (our Users). This mapping marketplace allows Providers to set their price for their work, and allows users to customize products to optimize the price they pay. WeoGeo handles the listing, hosting, and processing of the geocontent as well as the financial transactions. The Market is built on Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3), so it is completely scalable to the needs of the marketplace.

The second use of the technology is in the WeoGeo Server (http://Server.WeoGeo.com). WeoGeo Server is a network appliance that allows enterprise users to archive and browse their own geocontent. The Server runs within the enterprise’s network environment and is controlled by the enterprise. It contains all of the functionality of discovery and customization seen in the Market plus the ability to manage groups of users, which provides access control of geocontent.

The WeoGeo Market and WeoGeo Server are linked through a “Push to Market Button”. In a single click of a button, the enterprise may list a valuable piece of their archives for discovery and monetization. This feature transforms an archive cost center into an inventory revenue center.

Who are the key players behind WeoGeo?
Dr. W. Paul Bissett and Dr. David D.R. Kohler are the co-founders (and CEO, CTO respectively) of WeoGeo. WeoGeo was spun out of the Florida Environmental Research Institute, a non-profit research founded by Dr. Bissett in 1998. Dr. Bissett recruited Dr. Kohler as a Research Scientist and Principal Investigator in early 2001.

How did the idea for WeoGeo come about?
There were two points of pain that led to the creation of WeoGeo. The first is that there were numerous times that FERI was faced with build vs. buy decisions for searching, storing, processing, and distributing the geospatial datasets that were created within and outside the Institute. We evaluated the existing solutions and found that they didn’t meet our needs so we wrote our own. Our solutions to those problems provided a prototype for the development of WeoGeo. We proved to ourselves and to our clients that we could provide a better solution.

The second point of pain was in the inability to discover other geocontent with which to combine with our imagery products to produce value-added maps. We knew there were archives in educational and governmental institutions and commercial enterprises, but for the most part these were inaccessible (by being filed in a way that could not be easily retrieved, i.e. old media, lack of metadata, etc.) or too expensive. The Market concept spun out of trying to enable an exchange based approach to drawn the archives into the open, as well as fund the efforts of future developers of geocontent once those archives were accessible and discoverable.

What do you see as the biggest advantage of WeoGeo over other GIS data provision platforms?
WeoGeo provides a unique service that isn’t entangled with unnecessary or unneeded overhead. We fill a niche by connecting Providers and Users of geocontect in ways that are otherwise not possible. In addition, we are providing a marketplace approach where Providers may monetize their skills and content in a way that currently does not exist. We are removing inefficiency in the geospatial market – a proposition that benefits both buyers and sellers and allows us to bridge the verticals in the market. We believe that this will create an effect much like the Ebay-effect where market niches are created and filled by people with skills and content. This should create a rising tide of revenues in our geospatial industry through positive feedbacks between Users and Providers.

Who are your most common/frequent users to date?
Some of our research partners from FERI had seen previews of this technology before it was made public and were already lined up to order the first WeoGeo Servers. For the marketplace, we had a tremendous amount of interest from the remote sensing community since they have some of the biggest search/storage/customization/distribution issues. We’ve also been surprised by a big response from the GIS community. We had put off native support for vector data until after the launch but it seems that there appears to be a large unfilled need in the GIS market, and we are being pushed to accelerate our feature releases.

WeoGeo is one of the first geospatial companies to build its business on top of Amazon’s web services. What advantages do you see in using these web services? Are there any disadvantages?
The biggest advantage of AWS for us is in pay-as-you-go scalability. We were able to avoid the up-front expenditure in storage and processing hardware while we were incubating the project. Commodity computing is the future and Amazon is blazing the trail. There are however some disadvantages to using a freshly blazed trail – you get some scratches. There are some holes in what AWS provides and we’ve had to develop our own solutions, like WeoCEO (http://www.WeoSystems.com), to fill those holes. We believe very strongly in the future of utility computing are trying to help the community by releasing pieces of our infrastructure as we harden them for outside use.

What emerging technologies, other than Amazon’s web services, is WeoGeo using?
We use a variety of Open-Source Geospatial (OSGEO) tools for both the web front-end and for back-end processing. By the nature of open-source, these toolsets are constantly evolving. Our research staff is following the developments of OSGEO, and continually looking for possible intersections. We are eager to add further support in WeoGeo for vector data, web-services, and location-based services.