In 2010 I started a part-time research masters degree in software engineering. This masters was looking at the evolution of geospatial data in social media applications. As smartphones and tablets were taking off, the context of location was becoming increasingly used in social media.

For my research I built a generic location-based social media engine in Zend Framework 1 that could be used to implement a blogging platform, a wiki or content-sharing site which included the geolocation. The design of the engine was as such it required little in the alteration of the core application in order to build the application, only relying on a third-party developer to implement the specific content requirements. This also involved experimenting with geospatial queries using the MySQL, PostGIS and MongoDB.

One of the legacies of the project is the PHP Location Library for handling and calculating geospatial data.