Neighborhood-Based Local Search Filtering and Mapping is Now Feasible for All Web-Based Businesses

July 11, 2007; 03:47 AM
Maponics, LLC - a mapping provider to 20% of the Fortune 500™ - announced today the full release of Maponics Neighborhood Boundaries™, a neighborhood map polygon database with the potential to significantly improve the way businesses offer local search. Now companies in local search, social marketing, real estate, and related Web 2.0 industries will be able to offer search filtering and mapping based upon the most user-friendly city geography unit - the neighborhood.

Socially and culturally, people think of city geography in terms of neighborhoods. Until now, the lack of affordable and accurate neighborhood map data has forced sites offering local search to filter searches by city name or ZIP Code™. For major cities, this has meant poorly targeted results spanning too broad or granular a geographic area. The result has been unsatisfied users and lost ad revenue. By offering the opportunity to search by neighborhood, websites will now be able to provide more intuitive, relevant results.

Covering hundreds of the top US cities, the Maponics Neighborhood Boundaries database includes all latitude and longitude coordinates for each neighborhood polygon. It is specifically designed for easy integration into Google™, Yahoo!®, or Microsoft® map mash-ups or into back-end data analysis applications. Unique features include:

• Hand-drawn neighborhood map polygons, not aggregations of ZIP Codes or Census Tracts
• Neighborhood boundaries validated by over 1000 real estate agents
• Continuous city neighborhood data maintenance
• Ongoing addition of new cities
• Delivery in shapefile, ASCII, or other formats for easy integration
• Many auxiliary tables relating neighborhood maps data to ZIP Codes, school districts, and more

In the mobile world, imagine that a couple walking through SoHo in New York City gets a sudden craving for Indian food. With a mobile service backed by Maponics Neighborhood Boundaries, a search for restaurants in SoHo provides all the nearest SoHo options in an instant.

Maponics Neighborhood Boundaries offers several advantages over alternatives, including:

• Flexible licensing terms, to accommodate a wide variety of neighborhood map data applications
• Neighborhood boundaries that are based upon in-the-field analysis - not a statistical representation
• Commitment to excellence - Maponics is a full-service mapping company with a focus on providing high quality mapping and data

Maponics, LLC
America's largest corporations entrust Maponics with their mapping and data needs - including 20% of the Fortune 500. Maponics is located in Norwich, Vermont, with customers throughout the U.S. and Canada.