Trends for 2009: GeoData for fun and profit.

Sean Gorman first blipped the world’s radar in 2003 when his “tedious and unimportant” graduate thesis for George Mason University caught the eye of the Federal government as a potential national security threat. Gorman had married public data about business locations with the layouts of major internet backbones.

This being the post Mitnick era the Feds decided rather than shutting down the research they’d help fund it. The CIA’s incubator In-Q-Tel bought into Gorman’s FortusOne for $5.45M in 2007 which helped fund the open source wonder GeoCommons. The site allows you to quickly search, filter and overlay a wide variety of Geographically mapped data sets. Also allows users to upload their own sets too - either privately or sharable by the public.

The GeoCommons system opens up whole new areas of dimensionality to novice users - and shines as the model for the next generation data federation systems cropping up this year on the web.

Gorman gave a great overview at the 2008 Web 2.0 Conference. Turns out FortusOne isn’t particularly revenue driven at the moment (surprise surprise). It’s good to have Big Brother onboard as an equity partner.