One can learn about the following by attending the lecture:
1. Open sources of geodata
2. Tools to process such data
3. Indexing them to build a simple location-enabled search engine

Outline

1. Open sources for location information associated with structured and semi-structured data
   Wikipedia, DBPedia, Freebase, Geonames, US Military database etc.
2. Tools and methods to process the identified feeds:
   Google Refine, RDF libraries, custom feed processors
3. Building a simple search engine using the data processed above to support the following:
   Point, range, and neighbourhood searches

Draws from my experience extracting information from various online sources for building a mobile search engine (zook.in) as well as for building custom search systems at Ideophone.

Requirements

A basic idea of the following:
1. geodata
2. webservices

Speaker bio

Sundar has built/worked-on a number of information retrieval systems for Y! Travel, Shopping, Hotjobs, zook.in, and Ideophone. His primary work has been in crawling the web, extracting structured data from semi-structured information and processing that for indexing.