I've CC'ed this to the OpenGuides developers' list so people can comment.
On Fri, Mar 12, 2004 at 03:45:02PM -0800, karlis wrote:
I think the best way to do this would be some
GPSter-ish API for the
openguides code so that user clients can poll openguides directly. Each
city maintains it's own database/wiki/site?
Yes, that's right. Some of them live on the same machine, but most don't.
Are they linked in any other way, codewise, ie, is
there a coordinated
list of operating openguide installations?
At the moment, no. It would be a nice feature, I think, to have something
like the InterMap (
http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?InterMap) idea so you
could say "blah blah the [Paris:Arc De Triomphe]", or something like that,
probably located on
openguides.org that could be polled for updates.
What's the minimum location info that each node
will have? Postal code?
The minimum is actually zero - there are no mandated fields, because not
every node is actually geospatial in topic.
How do the queries like "Things within 500
metres of Piccadilly Circus
Station" work at the data level?
GPSter is really based on lat/lon coordinates (as the name might
suggest), so the key would be the translation of openguide nodes into
lat/lon positions. After that, moving the data around is easy.
At the moment, that's done by making calculations based on Ordnance Survey
coordinates that have been entered for the nodes, because that system
defines a convenient grid that's easier to manipulate for those calculations
than lat/lon figures - none of this tricky business with oblate spheroids.
We're very aware that this is proprietary to the UK, though, and are looking
into ways to replace it. In the last day or two, someone brought the UTM
system to my attention, and it seems to be a very good candidate
(
http://search.cpan.org/~grahamc/Geo-Coordinates-UTM-0.03/UTM.pm).
There doesn't seem to be a "click on the
map" style interface for
locating stuff.
Not yet, no, partially because of the insane cost of map data for this
country
(for example:
http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/products/10kraster/pricing.html).
We'd be very interested in having a map interface. Ivor Williams (who'll
read this on the list) is looking into doing visualisations of the stuff in
an OpenGuides database.
Are there any north american projects similar to
openguides, or is this
just very new?
Well, we've been around a couple of years but people have only started
contacting us and making their own sites around the world for the last few
months. There's a newborn OG install for San Francisco as of the other week
(
http://sf.openguides.org/). Similar projects I know of are Wikitravel
(
http://www.wikitravel.org/) and World66 (
http://www.world66.com/), but
they're not particularly North American. There's also a New York restaurant
guide thing that's fairly similar in idea, but I'm damned if I can find it
right now.
Best,
Earle.
--
Earle Martin
hex on
irc.perl.org
http://purl.oclc.org/net/earlemartin/