[Wikinews-l] Organizing work on bots

[Milos Rancic]

On 12/23/07, Brian McNeil <brian.mcneil at wikinewsie.org> wrote:
> A lot of how weather is implemented will depend on how we choose to present
> it. At the moment we've just the global map with only temperatures. It, to
> start with, would be a huge improvement if the map can be clicked on to
> bring up a map of one of the continents/regions with additional data. That
> could be on a page of its own with capital city conditions detailed in text
> underneath. Taking into account the size of Asia might mean we need futher
> drilldown from that.

My first goal is to make a working general algorithm. When we have
data, presentation is only a matter of our decision.

So, here are some notes about my approach:

- Like for all other comparable things (exchange rates, and even
automatic adopting of news), I have two types of sources: global and
local. Local source is more relevant, but until we don't have local
sources for the whole world, we have to use for "the rest of the
world" some global service.
- So, again, as an achievable example, I am using data from Serbian
Meteorological Agency as a local source and I am trying to find some
good global service (I am in the phase of finishing algorithm for
parsing data from Serbian Meteorological Agency site).
- A couple of days ago, I was looking what should be covered firstly.
Then I went to Wikipedia and realized that we need to think about the
next places as our priority: List of urban areas by population [1],
World's largest urban agglomerations [2] (those two are the most
important), List of metropolitan areas by population [3], List of
cities by population [4] (next two are important, too) and the less
important List of cities by surface area [5].

So, those cities/urban areas should be covered at the global map (the
last category only if there is enough of space in the area on the
map). There would be a lot of space in Siberia, Canada, Arctic,
Antarctica, even in Australia etc. So, we should find representative
places in those areas (while it is quite easy for Australia, we will
have to find the most important places in North Canada, Siberia,
Greenland and the most important scientific bases on Antarctica.

After that, we would be able to think about continental maps or by
using some more natural type of partitioning Earth: Europe,
Mediterranean, Middle East, South-East Asia, South Asia, Eastern Coast
of USA and Canada etc.

In the mean time, we need to have good resources. Primary sources are
meteorological agencies of particular country/state/region. As many of
them we have, our data will be more accurate. Note that those agencies
have a lot of data which are interesting only at the country level
(which may be our next goal for presentation)...

> I've done work on financial software for business in the past, how are you
> organising the data? Have you selected a base currency and stored all rates
> from it to other currencies? Either USD or EUR for that, then to get from
> any currency to any other currency you have two conversions unless one is
> the base. From these results you could build a table onto a country portal
> listing the country's currency and rate to a variety of other currencies.
>
> I've also dealt with the software side of transitioning from a national
> currency to EUR, so if you've any questions on that.

I've done it a couple of days ago [6] and I may send to you the code
(while it will be accessible on Toolserver).

In short, there are "global" and "local" currencies. USD and EUR are
"global" and other are "local". Local currency is giving only their
rate to one of the global currencies and all other rates are done via
global currencies.

In this moment I have data from European Central Bank and National
Bank of Serbia. As ECB doesn't have exchange rates for Serbian Dinar
(as far as I understand economics, RSD is not traded currency or
something like that), information for RSD is based on its rate
compared to EUR, after which all other rates are calculated according
to EUR rates. (Actually, National Bank of Serbia is doing the same: it
defines relation between RSD and EUR, after which it calculates other
rates on ECB rates.)

It is possible to make similar algorithms for all other currencies.
But, it is good to know that you are introduced in that. I am sure
that I'll have questions for your. The most important is how to keep
factually correct rates when part would be based on USD and part on
EUR.

> >- Goods prices at stock markets (we should analyze the situation).
>
> [[Portal:Business knowledge]] going to:
> [[Wikinews:Business LSE]]
> [[Wikinews:Business NYSE]]
> [[Wikinews:Business NASDAQ]]
> ...
>
> Do we have anyone who tracks anything on the stock market could detail what
> information would be useful? In the cases here I believe the data isn't
> copyrightable, but the presentation may be. Thus we may have to work out our
> own way of presenting the information. These will be pages where tables of
> data will be presented, presumably with some in expand/collapse boxes to
> keep the initial presentation reasonable. People who are interested in that
> will either spend a minute looking up one detail or ages reading quite a bit
> out of the data.
>
> An example of how you could show the NYSE 100 is in a table with alternating
> shaded lines to ease reading across the data.

So, it would be good to have someone who knows all of those things. I
tried to find something, but I found data only on CNN's site, which
may be accurate, but it shouldn't be our primary source of
informations.

* * *

At the end, please think about presentation! I am so much in parsing
and numbers so I am have a little time to organize presentation.
Making a concept at one static wiki page as an example of your concept
would be a very good input.

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_urban_areas_by_population
[2] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_largest_urban_agglomerations
[3] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_areas_by_population
[4] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_population
[5] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_surface_area
[6] - http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Template:Exchange_rates