This interesting tidbit comes from an article on RWW titled, Can OpenGeocoder Fill the Platform Gap Left by Google Maps? It looks at a new, Open GeoCoder developed by Steve Coast, founder of OpenStreetMap

From the article...

How do machines understand what place you're talking about when you say the name of a city, a street or a neighborhood? With geocoding technology, that's how. Every location-based service available uses a geocoder to translate the name of a place into a location on a map. But there isn't a really good, big, stable, public domain geocoder available on the market.

Steve Coast, the man who lead the creation of Open Street Map, has launched a new project to create what he believes is just what the world of location-based services needs in order to grow to meet its potential. It's called OpenGeocoder and it's not like other systems that translate and normalize data.

Article by Marshall Kirkpatrick (@marshallk) - see the full article here on RWW

For more on OpenGeocoder, see Steve Coast's Blog