Dec 18, 2008
One thing that often frustrates me when working with a map is the absence of meaningful neighbourhoods. For example, try finding ‘Marchmont’ in Edinburgh, Scotland using Google Maps. You might find ‘Marchmont Road’ but that only gives an indication as to the area that the people of Edinburgh consider to be ‘Marchmont’ the neighbourhood.
A novel approach has been taken to resolve this and similar problems using Flickr’s 90 million geotagged photographs: The Shape of Alpha.
A handy demonstration of the API has been developed by Tom Talyor. A good example of the power of crowd sourced datasets.
Feb 12, 2007
A few people are posting on their first attempts at using ‘Pipes’ - the latest web offering from Yahoo. Pipes provides an online, user friendly GUI, to mix and match RSS data – the name of the service pays tribute to Unix pipes. I played around a little with it at the weekend and am impressed. Mikal has documented his attempt to generate a GeoRSS feed which locates any blogs that are discussing a particular technorati tag…he also contemplates some of the functionality Pipes might embrace in the future.
One thing I’d really like Pipes (or a similar service) to offer is a web based graphical interface with code behind that best guesses the XSL file required to get from one flavour of XML to another, or allows the user to match elements in each of the XML files in a ‘drag and drop’ fashion. Maybe it’s already out there and I haven’t found it? I think it would be really useful service, especially for people who don’t work with XML and XPath on a daily basis, helping to transform XML datasets into a format they can use.
