To: jeroen De Dauw <jeroen_dedauw(a)yahoo.com>
Cc: semediawiki-devel(a)lists.sourceforge.net; mediawiki-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Sent: Sunday, August 23, 2009 1:47:14 PM
Subject: Re: [SMW-devel] Maps and Semantic Maps released
Jeroen:
Geocoding means using a proprietary service, and getting a license that could easily be
revoked. I don't know how acquainted you are with American politics, but let me tell
you this:
has been playing politics with their search engine, their tools,
everything. They have rigged their searches to push politically conservative and
religiously oriented sites to the bottom of the rankings--which is why my wiki never bears
mention in any search on Google, but they bear plenty of good mention on other search
engines.
If they have demonstrated their willingness to play politics with their search engine,
what is to stop them from playing politics with any of their other /proprietary/ APIs? A
/proprietor/ reserves the right to refuse service to anyone, for any reason or no reason.
I don't want to be held at the mercy of any /proprietor/. That rather defeats, even
violates, the purpose of open-source. I want to be able to do all my maps on OpenLayers,
and stay away from Google, if I can. I'm not even sure that our license (the GFDL)
would even /allow/ us to do anything else. That aside, we have a policy to stay a million
kilometers away from anything that even hints at a legal encumbrance.
Besides: some of my sites are ancient, and might not even exist anymore. For such sites,
geocoding, even /open-source/ geocoding, would be flatly impossible.
Temlakos
jeroen De Dauw wrote:
Hey,
Does either Maps or Semantic Maps provide a means
by which to display a
map with a marker at a set of coordinates given in degrees,
minutes, and
seconds?
No, they do not support that notation. It would not be that hard to implement, but no
one has asked for it before, so I guess the demand is pretty low.
Is simply geocoding the actual addresses with the build in #geocode parser function [0]
not an option? That way you can avoid having to work with coordinates all together.
[0]
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Maps#Geocoding
Cheers,
Jeroen De Dauw
Forum: code <http://code.bn2vs.com>.bn2vs.com <http://code.bn2vs.com>
Blog:
blog.bn2vs.com <http://blog.bn2vs.com>
Skype: rts.bn.vs ; Xfire: bn2vs
Don't panic. Don't be evil.
70 72 6F 67 72 61 6D 6D 69 6E 67 20 34 20 6C 69 66 65!
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*From:* Temlakos <temlakos(a)gmail.com>
*To:* jeroen De Dauw <jeroen_dedauw(a)yahoo.com>
*Cc:* semediawiki-devel(a)lists.sourceforge.net; mediawiki-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
*Sent:* Sunday, August 23, 2009 3:18:19 AM
*Subject:* Re: [SMW-devel] Maps and Semantic Maps released
Dear Jeroen:
Does either Maps or Semantic Maps provide a means by which to display a
map with a marker at a set of coordinates given in degrees, minutes, and
seconds? All your examples for simple display of a single point use
floating-point degree quantities. This would force me to hand-convert,
and that seems rather pointless to me.
What I would like to do is design a template for a settlement, or a
landmark (e.g., mountain, hill, valley), that will include a map of the
immediate region and automatically place a marker at the specified
coordinates in the article on that settlement or landmark.
A query formatted as a map with many points on it looks great. And it
would be wonderful for an article on a country, because I could place
markers for every city and/or landmark in that country. But when I write
an article for a city or a mountain, I annotate coordinates in degrees,
minutes, and seconds. Or must I get used to specifying them in floats?
Temlakos
jeroen De Dauw wrote:
Hey,
First of all, let me introduce myself.
I'm Jeroen De Dauw, one of the GSoC students for Wikimedia foundation
this year. During the last 2 months I've been working on 2 new mapping
extensions for MediaWiki and Semantic MediaWiki
<http://semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki> [0] with Yaron
Koren <http://yaronkoren.com/> [1] as mentor. You can read more about
this at my blog <http://blog.bn2vs.com/tag/semantic-maps/> [2].
The first version of both extensions has just been released. These are
the extensions:
Maps
Maps <http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Maps> [3] is an
extension that provides the ability to display coordinate data, using
multiple mapping services, including Google Maps [4], OpenLayers [5]
and Yahoo Maps [6], and allows users to geocode addresses.
Semantic Maps
Semantic Maps <http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Semantic_Maps>
[7] is an extension that adds semantic capabilities to the Maps
extension, and therefore provides the ability to add, view and edit
coordinate data stored through the Semantic MediaWiki extension, using
multiple mapping services. These include Google Maps, OpenLayers and
Yahoo Maps. Semantic Maps and Maps are based on Semantic Google Maps
and Semantic Layers, and are meant to replace these extensions. For
this extension to work, you need to have both Semantic MediaWiki and
Maps installed.
You can download both extensions via their documentation pages.
Suggestions and feature requests are welcome.
[0]
http://semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki
[1]
http://yaronkoren.com/
[2]
http://blog.bn2vs.com/tag/semantic-maps/
[3]
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Maps
[4]
http://code.google.com/apis/maps/
[5]
http://openlayers.org/
[6]
http://developer.yahoo.com/maps/
[7]
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Semantic_Maps
Cheers,
De Dauw '[RTS]BN+VS*'
Jeroen
Forum: code
<http://code.bn2vs.com>.bn2vs.com <http://code.bn2vs.com>
Blog:
blog.bn2vs.com <http://blog.bn2vs.com>
Xfire: bn2vs ; Skype: rts.bn.vs
Don't panic. Don't be evil.
70 72 6F 67 72 61 6D 6D 69 6E 67 20 34 20 6C 69 66 65!
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