[OGDev] Worldwide Wifi Guide

[IvorW]

Christopher Schmidt wrote:

>JibberJim, in #swhack[1], was wondering how easy it would be to create a
>guide that aggregated all the locations with decent wifi into one place.
>(seeAlso blog entry[2] on same topic.)
>
>OpenGuides is a good software solution to this, given a few tweaks:
>Specifically, tweaking the fields such that there is a city (state in
>some cases) and country metadata field.
>  
>
Ticket #36 is relevant here, for which I have a longstanging patch. 
There are some RDF ontological issues here about how we present an address.

>After that, an aggregator would need to be built, to allow for moving
>the data that already exists in some categories on other guides (wifi,
>free wifi) into the 'wifi' guide.
>
>Implementation details are being handwaved here, in part because I'm not
>the biggest master of the code -- what do other people think about this?
>I think ivorw has the best knowledge of a mirroring process, I know how
>to add additional metadata fields (although I'm not convinced I know the
>*best* way to do it, just *a* way), and I'm sure that 'we' as the
>OpenGuides team would be willing to participate in adminiship of such a
>guide.
>  
>
Have a look at the CPAN module OpenGuides::RDF::Reader:
http://search.cpan.org/~ivorw/OpenGuides-RDF-Reader/

This contains the mirror script og_mirror which can be used as a basis 
for something specific:
http://search.cpan.org/src/IVORW/OpenGuides-RDF-Reader-0.05/scripts/og_mirror

Tailoring this script should be fairly straightforward - no advanced 
Perl knowledge is needed.

Also, if you replace the sub populate_local_wiki with something else, 
you don't have to store the output in an OpenGuide.

Keep me posted if you are trying this approach, or if you need help.

>This would also be a good oppourtunity to test our aggregation ability
>for the purposes of building an interface at OpenGuides.org that allows
>people to search worldwide for something, rather than just in each
>guide, something that I think has been discussed before.
>
>Anyone else interested in this project?
>  
>
Yes, definitely! I have experimented with mirroring multiple guides into 
one, and this works, subject to a problem with ambiguous pages that I 
haven't worked out how to resolve yet.

I've been mooting running a general mirroring service for all guides - 
or at least all guides that want it.

Also, I'm prepared to host test.openguides.org to run mirrors on the 
latest software (svn + selected patches)

Cheers,

Ivor.