YPG is Canada's leading local commercial search provider and largest directory publisher. It owns and manages the country's most visited online directories, YellowPages.ca and Canada411.ca. The company also has a network of seven local city sites that attract more than seven million unique visitors a month.

URBANWARE is a solution from Urban Mapping. Its data is used in the directories as a basis of their ranking algorithm for geographical search results. This allows end-users to search for merchants by neighbourhood. YPG is then able to visually present these search results to the user by using the database's neighbourhood centroids (latitude/longitude) and border information.

"Not only does Urban Mapping offer the industry's most comprehensive neighbourhood coverage for both Canada and the US, but we also understand the complexities of working with neighbourhood boundaries," said Ian White, CEO of Urban Mapping. "Recognising that a location can technically be in two or more neighbourhoods is what led to our patent-pending approach to defining informal space.

"We offer the only solution that truly accounts for the informal nature of how neighbourhoods are viewed," he added.

Urban Mapping has been busy since TWB's most recent report on URBANWARE. In the last two months its boundary collection for the US has increased by 5,000 to 75,000 neighbourhoods for more than 3,000 cities and towns.  In addition, Urban Mapping's set of international boundary data now includes roughly 17,000 neighbourhoods across Canada and Europe, 2,000 more than two months ago.

By geographically encoding boundaries of thousands of neighbourhoods, Urban Mapping provides precise latitude and longitude points for every neighbourhood. The data can be accessed through a simple API and is also available in other formats including XML, WKT, ASCII and SHP.

• Ian White is one the expert speakers taking part in Navigation & Location USA in San Jose on December 1-2.