On Tue, Feb 22, 2005 at 08:25:09AM +0000, Rev Simon Rumble wrote:

I can't really tell from the tiny little aerial photo given. Not enough context. If things like Hyde Park, Big Ben, Hammersmith Flyover, Earls Court etc were marked, I might be able to work it out.

okay, i view this as a cartography failure on my part; the hopes of this map, over the old consume.net one, was that it *would* supply identifying context... which is easier if your node is right near the isle of dogs ;) what else have i got that will help...

try this: http://map.wirelesslondon.info/area/?postcode=W14 - i added a layer of OG points to the mapserver (which is more rawly at http://map.wirelesslondon.info/map/map.cgi?mode=browse )

they're not differentiated, because all i know now is that they are geo:SpatialThings ... one option i could pursue is filtering all the public transport types, and just show them (with little icons like on the splash pages already?)

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3. the things near you are SpatialThings but they don't have osx/y.

Well this is about 100m up the road from my place, and has coordinates: http://london.openguides.org/index.cgi?Baron%27s_Court_Station

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4. i fucked up something else.

That could be it?

i see several things that went wrong: - the places didnt get their special geometry after crawling, this is fixed - the spatial query that i have saying "show me N nearest things" appears to be giving bad results for your location. i really don't know why, because: - it worked fine in E14 - Schuyler helped me write the query, and i was kind of sleepy at the time, and now i don't understand how it works

my guess is that the query is returning distances in the wrong order in radius N, and there are a lot more points in the Open Guide "near" you than "near" me.

back to the displaying-points matter; apart from inferring things from types, which are just strings anyway wth no reinforcing taxonomy like WordNet (folkschonomy mutter, metacrap), i have no way of making guesses about how *important* things are in different presentation contexts. public transport is always important, and is often on maps. park types, maybe, though they look odd demarcated with points (better park shapes as part of the London Free Map schtick comes next; http://uo.space.frot.org/?LondonFreeMap ) but "this place is important, therefore this one is not" is ripe for annotation wars...

i am very open to suggestions on what would make the WL map more usable / more like something that people would point and shout at, within our means. and for making a free map webservice that is useful to OG...

zx