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_mirro...
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.