On Fri 06 Aug 2004, Rev Simon Rumble simon@rumble.net wrote:

What I'm talking about is a geek/engineer tourism site. I'm one of those sad types who, when touring around Vietnam, stops and gawks at big (http://www.rumble.net/travel/photos/vietnam/nw/thumb/nwdamfish-9-0.html) and small (http://www.rumble.net/travel/photos/vietnam/nw/thumb/nwhydro3-9-0.html) engineering marvels.

Neat. I can't work out what the second photo is though.

So I'd like to have a site that collects information about this kind of thing. Power stations, significant dams, historic sewage system features, giant tunnels, spy stations, bomb shelters, architectural marvels and follies, engineering accidents, atomic bomb test sites etc etc. The site would include photos, historical information, transport information, opening hours and prices, details of preferred viewing sites and GPS coordinates.

That sounds great.

So it occurred to me that Openguides has already achieved much of this in a suitably open and geek-ready format. However, it doesn't fit your ontology. Your site gives guides for a particular city or region, whereas this idea would work best as an integrated, global site. That way you could look at a meta-topic on an area of interest (say, atomic test sites).

So, what sort of thing do you need from us? Are you wanting a way to customise the openguides software to your needs, or are you wondering about ways to connect up the guides a bit more, so say the London guide would automatically have links to the London bits of your guide in the right places and vice versa?

I can see this cross-guide linking is probably a problem you've already encountered (compare the tube networks of London and New York) and discussed, so I'm curious to hear your thoughts.

From the start I've wanted different Open Guides to be able to talk to

each other - the ordinary Oxford Guide and the vegan one, and the London and Oxford ones for example (say you search for something in the Oxford guide and it isn't there, London may be close enough).

Tell me more about what you're thinking of.

Kake

On Sat, Aug 07, 2004 at 08:39:39PM +0100, Kake L Pugh wrote:

From the start I've wanted different Open Guides to be able to talk to each other - the ordinary Oxford Guide and the vegan one, and the London and Oxford ones for example (say you search for something in the Oxford guide and it isn't there, London may be close enough).

Another thing I've thought of recently: it would be nice to have a UK-wide openguides that serves as a place to put content for places that don't have their own city guide. This could be made powerful by a few technical measures, such as being able to automatically transfer content (ie export) to another guide and set up redirects, so that, for example, if I make some nodes near Cambridge and then at some future point someone goes to set up a Cambridge Open Guide he can talk to the UK-wide guide and ask for an export of all the nodes within a certain radius, and set up redirects to the Cambridge guide. This could of course be hierachical to the extent that there is a global Open Guide. Describing all this in code seems quite complicated and subtle, and there are probably other interesting things along the same line that could be done with a nice interwiki API <insert buzzwords of choice here>.

This is just wild speculation at the moment, and it's probably beyond my abilities as a programmer to implement, but I thought it was worth a mention as a point in this discussion.

Cheers,

Dominic.