Yes - Dan and I talked about this during the hackathon. Dan was thinking bigger and even more generic then me. The two could potentially play hand in hand - essentially the Map namespace would be used to make and curate maps and provide basic embedding and the Visualisation* namespace could be used to point to a Map page as the data source to do more complex things with the data set.
It would be good to play with this idea some more. The best next step in my opinion would be to find a more complicated example of what the community is currently doing with maps and use the Visualisation namespace to recreate that visualisation using a map that exists in the map namespace.
PS. Do we own wikimaps.org - I can imagine a map wiki would be extremely useful project to us.
* or suggest better name :-)
On Wed, May 14, 2014 at 2:14 PM, Antoine Musso hashar+wmf@free.fr wrote:
Le 14/05/2014 00:34, Jon Robson a écrit :
During the Zurich hackathon, DJ Hartman, Aude and I knocked up a generic maps prototype extension [1]. We have noticed that many maps like extensions keep popping up and believed it was time we standardised on one that all these extensions could use so we share data better. [1] https://github.com/jdlrobson/WikiMaps
<snip> > Dan Andreescu also created a similar visualisation namespace which may > want to be folded into this as a map could be seen as a visualisation. > I invite Dan to comment on this with further details :-)!
Hello Jon,
In short, I have been very impressed by the lightning presentation of WikiMaps and Dan Vizualization extension.
- WikiMaps seems to be a subset of Dan hack, it uses GeoJSON and renders
them on top of an OpenStreet map layer.
- Dan Viz extensions goes a step further since it uses any JSON based
format (ie GeoJSON) and then let you pick a renderer (ie: map) and finely tweak the resulting output.
Both will make it way easier to render data set in a meaningful way to our users and I am inviting you to *merge both efforts* to build the next generation data visualization utility.
A typical use case for me would be:
- get the the population of countries over time (from wikidata?)
- collaboratively work on a data visualization
- have the resulting render parameters saved up with an id
- insert it in article
Such a system has been created previously but went down in 2010: Swivel. You can still find articles about it though, ie:
http://datavisualization.ch/tools/swivel-review-%E2%80%93-a-guest-post-on-in... http://infosthetics.com/archives/2010/04/social_visualization_software_revie...
It was essentially wikidata geared toward datasets with a very nice graphical interface to build and share data visualization. People could vote for the best rendering and you could comment and share them easily.
(((random I am a naive person mumbling)))
The last fifteen years have seen information and knowledge spreading all around the planet, big data is the next revolution. The challenge comes in apprehending them and your visualization tools are definitely a step forward.
If anyone has doubt about data visualization, you should have a look at a 20 minutes tech talk which nicely highlight how there is no more third world countries any more (among other debunking): http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen
Heck, if I had the opportunity I will reach out to the community, make data visualization part of the Wikimedia strategic plan and raise a few millions dollars to make it a project of its own. It has so much leverage to better understand the world we are living in. If such project looked for a data visualization evangelist, I would be on the front line.
-- Antoine "hashar" Musso
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