I work with a lot of consumer startups that are dealing with location-aware information. From a programmer perspective, it’s just plain hard. Not only is it difficult to find a great source for quality geo data, but then you typically want to correlate it across multiple social systems (Foursquare, Yelp, etc). Some of my favorite code monkeys have just made this problem a little easier.

Infochimps is pioneering a somewhat new category, named data-as-a-service. Today they’re announcing the availability of the Infochimps Geo API (geo-spatial application programming interface). The Geo API enables developers to incorporate geographic data sources and features into their software applications by adding a layer of diverse and rich location information. The Geo API provides data from open sources such as Geonames, the National Climatic Data Center and the American Community Survey, as well as licensed sources such as Foursquare and Locationary.

To show how easy and cool the Geo API is, they had a non-programmer create a cool little sample application. The Travel Guide app helps users find notable travel spots for destinations around the world, placing Wikipedia and Foursquare venues on a map to show interesting museums, parks, and nightlife locations in any city in the world.

“This is a transformational development for the geo data market,” said Flip Kromer, Co-founder and CTO of Infochimps. “Up until now, developers have faced issues and barriers when working with geo data – everything from the difficulty in finding accurate, up-to-date data, to the lack of query-based standards. Infochimps’ goal in releasing our Geo API is to democratize the market’s access to a variety of geo data in an easy to digest form.”

The Geo API delivers an extensive set of features for building social, geo, and mapping applications, including:

• Disparate Data Sources Unified by the Infochimps Simple Schema (ICSS) – Regardless of its original source, data is organized into a unified schema that makes integrating data from multiple sources quick and easy.
• More Ways To Ask The Questions You Want with Multiple Locator Options – Standard geographic locators like street address, bounding box, quadkey, and latitude/longitude can be used to query any data source in the Geo API. Furthermore, any dimension that can be mapped back to a location, such as a Wikipedia Page ID or Foursquare Venue ID, can also be used to query.
• Summarizer Tool Allows for Easy Roll-ups of Data –The Summarizer, a unique feature of the Geo API, manages the flood of data when queries return a large amount of matching results. The Summarizer makes data query results more usable by organizing data points into intelligent geographic clusters.

Here’s another neat example. Animated weather station data from 1892 – 2011. We’ve grown a lot of weather stations in the past hundred years.

The Geo API release continues Infochimps’ commitment to making data more accessible, while helping to push the market for application development forward through easy access to a rich variety of data sources and APIs, giving developers the ability to focus on building awesome apps.

To access the Geo API, developers can quickly register for an Infochimps API key and immediately begin building on the data for free, making up to 100,000 free API calls per month.

The Infochimps Geo API is available today with the following data sources:

• Foursquare
• Locationary Points of Interest
• Wikipedia Pages
• Zillow Neighborhood Boundaries
• Bundle.com
• Digital Element
• US Census
• American Community Survey 2009
• National Climate Data Center
• Geonames
• Zip Codes
• Political Boundaries
• UFO Sightings