We love to travel. More than that, we love to plan trips.

Before the web, we were blind; inspired by literature but hostages to a travel agent’s knowledge or a tour company’s marketing. Now we are liberated but overloaded by information, most of it useless. We are swimming in page after page of ads, lists and reviews. We are empowered by access, but lost in a land of dead ends and commercial opportunism.

We want an organized web of maps, pictures, details and advice about every place in the world that anyone has ever travelled to. We don’t want to sift through everything, but neither do we want to miss out on anything. We want succinct and relevant. We want simple and fast. We want free and honest. We want it for everyone and by everyone.

It’s an impossible project. We’re building it anyway. Are you in?

logbook

  • Traveliness Guesser White PaperSunday 20 July 2008

    by David Nadeau

    Abstract: The traveliness guesser is a Web page classifier paired with a subjectivity analyzer that ranks information according to its credibility and its relevance to the travel domain, either in essence or by mean of entities commonly useful to a traveler.

    Read this White paper

  • What is openplacesFriday 13 June 2008

    A semantic search engine for travel. An effort to aggregate, classify and structure all of the travel information on the web, to build a genuine and accurate representation of the world we travel.

    A collaboration to fill in the blanks, where everything is freely licensed under Creative Commons.

    A level playing field. A place where quality and relevance determine ranking, unimpeded by commissions and other commercial dealings.


Working at openplaces

We are a small team of creative people, working hard to bring to life new ideas about how online travel should work. We use natural language processing, semantic web technologies and custom search algorithms to transform ridiculously huge volumes of data into useful information.

If this sounds like something you might want to be a part of, check out our job page. We have positions open in Montreal, Canada.

Our office