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Getting Back into Mapping.
This coming Thursday (July 21, 2005), I will be speaking in The Virtual ATDP class about mixing maps and other data.
Ideally, I'd like to take the lecture as an opportunity to talk about the mixing of data and services but I'm wondering whether there is already too much in mapping to get to the theme of remix.
Interestingly enough, the New York Times has an article on the subject today: Marrying Maps to Data for a New Web Service - New York Times -- which I will mention to the students as background reading.
I will have 45 minutes, so I need to cut to the chase. Things to cover:
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what is GIS?
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the state of web-based maps before Google Maps: when I was (more or less) happy with Yahoo maps
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Google maps
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Yahoo maps trying to catch up
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hacking: mixing with Flickr
What I hope to demo is a MoinMoin macro which lets me type in Flickr tags, which then displays a Google map with pictures with those tags (in addition to the geotagged tag.) I'm not sure I'll be able to do enough programming to pull that demo off, especially because my programming technique is a tad rusty right now.
References
All my geotagged Flickr pictures
Yahoo map comparison
Next steps:
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do much better error handling, including checking for valid lat/lon, downtime in the API
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figure out how to center the map to where the pictures actually are
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figure out how to pick an optimal zoom level for the map
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allow the embedding of more than one map per page (That means wrapping the Javascript so that it can nicely embedded with multiple copies of itself) (I should refer to
Coding For Portability, Part 1 » Thirteenth Parallel for help on these issues)
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recast the map as an AJAX application where the user can dynamically change the parameters of the search.
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make a version for Yahoo maps and for Google Earth.
