Daniel Mayer wrote:
Translating is one thing, literally tracing is very
different. Tracing does not
require any creativity at all. But as I said, the particulars in regard to GIS
data have not been tested yet (AFAIK). The Court may find there is a compelling
interest in giving that type of GIS data copyright protection. Thus we must
play it safe and create our own whenever PD data is not available.
Well, I don't know much about GIS data, or mapping, and I'll prove that
through my following proposal :-)
Looking at a map, I see three possible structures:
* Points (coordinates and altitde), like in mountain tops, cities (their
center, at least), etc.
* Open polygons ("polyline", made from points as described above), like
rivers
* Closed polygons, for regions, states, counties, lakes, continents, etc.
A world map can be described by everything belonging to another object.
"Lake Superior" would thus belong to the next larger units, namely
Ontario, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Ontario belongs to Canada,
whereas the others belong to the US. Both Canada and the US belong to
the continent America, which belongs to the world.
The outer shape of, say, Wisconsin, can now be calculated by merging all
objects that belong to Wisconsin. Likewise, the outer shape of the NATO
can be calculated by merging all countries that belong to the NATO.
Drawing a map of a region with given coordinates can thus easily exclude
irrelevant parts by going down from world view; if Europe is not visible
on the given part of the map, it can be excluded from drawing as a
whole, speeding up map drawing.
Likewise, one could just require to show a bunch of objects ("Lake
Superior", "New York", "Ottawa"), and a rectangular view of the
world
map is selected that includes all these objects; that map section is
then piped into the process above.
But how to create such a complex structure? After all, an object *might*
consist of a bunch of multiple polygons (can't think of an example right
now); it probably belongs to several objects; it might be of different
"types" (for example, "Hamburg, Germany" is both a county and a
city).
I believe the best way to do this is (surprise!) through a wiki. *But*,
one that will, upon saving, analyze (parse) a page and put the contents
into a separate database, which is then used to draw the maps and do
other things (like click on a map, and it takes you to the object you
clicked on, thus a reverse-lookup).
This has the advantage to be open to practical structures. For example,
it might be a good idea to list most of the cities on the same page as
the county they're in, instead of creating thousands of one-line
"darticles" (from "data-article"). Exceptions can, of course, be made,
like "Kansas City", which belongs to both Kansas and Missouri. The
database would remember where that data came from, so one can always
find the source "darticle". [Note that this is a little different from
the wikidata concept, as there is no from to enter your data, rather a
markup which then gets parsed.]
As there are various types of data to enter, I propose a HTML/XML-like
structure (which would make parsing a breeze once the XML-parser is up
and running :-):
<mapdata>
<name>Lake Superior</name>
<type magnitude=5>lake</type>
<polygon>x,y,a;x,y,a;x,y,a;x,y,a;x,y,a</polygon>
<belongsto>Ontario</belongsto>
<belongsto>Minnesota</belongsto>
<belongsto>Wisconsin</belongsto>
<belongsto>Canada</belongsto>
</mapdata>
with x,y=coordinates, a=altitude, magnitude between 1-5, where 1 is
smallest and 5 is largest object category of that type
This schema could also work for multiple languages:
<name language="de">...</name>
For keeping data consistent, I propose that we require one <name>
without language attribute (or language="en"), which is both the English
name and the identifier in the database. Alternate names could then be
used in map drawing in different wikipedias.
For those of you concerned about Even More HTML, and that being to
complicated for newbies: I strongly believe that anyone who can take
down GPS coordinates or calculate them from a map, and go to wikipedia
to enter them, should be able to make at least the basic entry in that
manner when shown a good example first.
The final piece missing, the actual "drawing syntax" in the actual
wikipedia article, is another thing entirely, and should be discussed
separately IMHO. However, as the above schema uses labels for objects,
it would easily be possible to implement something like "show the US and
Canada; 300x300 pixel; outline the Greate Lakes in red, 3px pen; show
the US in brown; show Canada in green; show all other countries in pink;
show country borders; show rivers of magnitude 4 and 5; show mountains
of magnitude 4 and 5".
But I'm sure the mapping pros would do something entirely different.
Magnus