Blog: Geotagging

Simple Forms Increase Data Submission Rates

As Eric mentioned in his post last week about the Pandemic Preparedness mapping project, we spent a lot of time limiting the complexity on the data entry side of the site. We needed something clean and easy to use that still ensures that all the needed information is collected from the public health organizations using the form. We spent a good amount time tweaking the data entry forms themselves to try and streamline the data entry process. I pulled together a short screencast to show how a good data entry process can work, specifically looking at the provincial drilldown widget that allows users to easily geotag their content.

Since I'm sure other folks working with large taxonomies are also struggling to make their data entry forms simpler and more user friendly, I wanted to share more detail on how I built this. It's entirely javascript, and though it took a bit of time it works in IE 6 and 7, as well as the more reasonable browsers out there like Firefox and Safari. Aside from normal cross browser testing, we also tested it to make sure it could handle large numbers of terms. I built the initial widget with a set of test data with just a dozen or so terms, and it worked great, but once I imported the full region/country/province list into Drupal, the widget needed to be fully reworked.

In its current state, the widget is fairly tailored to the particular kind of hierarchy that this site needed, but there is some starter code in my sandbox for people that want to try something similar on their own. Please beware that it will most certainly need some modifications to work in other sites.

Using Fresh, Quality Ingredients to Geocode, Geotag, and Geoviews Your News

We are currently working on a project for a disaster relief organization. Our client was interested in mapping aggregated disaster relief news over a map. This is something of a mini-project in itself, but a combination of awesome modules and some custom pieces made this job a relatively straightforward process.

The goal:

fig.1: A map with new stories + prominent country tags

fig.2: Click a map point to see the headline

The recipe:

• 40 disaster relief organization news feeds: These will serve as the raw sources for our news page — they provide the titles, stories and urls

• Yahoo Pipes: Mixes up and mashes together these 40 feeds into a few feeds for us to aggregate. In addition, it will geocode stories when it can, adding geo:lat and geo:lon tags to rss items.

• FeedAPI: The same core feed aggregation engine we are using on Managing News and other projects.

• FeedAPI Geo: A simple FeedAPI plugin I hacked together to tag a geocoded item with its respective country (in development, to be released soon)

• Geonames: A great API module that lets you hook into the free geonames service — FeedAPI Geo is using this to reverse-lookup a country name from a lat/lon point.

• Graphite: A custom mapping stack that allows nodes with a CCK lat/lon field to be mapped onto a simple CSS/XHTML based map with JavaScript popups. It provides a Views plugin, so all you do is choose the nodes you want, add the appropriate CCK lat/lon field, choose the graphite view style, and voila your nodes are on the map. (in development, to be released soon, expect delays)

• Tagadelic + Tagadelic Views: Two bread + butter tag visualization modules that let us take our country tags and show story distribution.

Bake in the oven for 45 minutes.

Beautiful!

A Glimpse at how Geocoding Helps Identify Stories in Managing News

I first noticed the trend at 4:00 pm yesterday afternoon when I was testing Managing News - it looked like something was going on in the Caribbean. I jumped over to CNN to see what was happening and saw that a major earthquake hit the Caribbean yesterday two hours before.

This morning I went back to Managing News to check out the earthquake coverage and checked out the geocoded map that Jeff talked about yesterday. The Caribbean earthquake news really jumps out.

Two Widgets We Used to Show Off Photos on StandAgainstPoverty.org

At the height of the UN Millennium Campaign's Stand Up Speak Out campaign last week, a ton of photos were uploaded to StandAgainstPoverty.org in just one day. So many in fact, that at least one photo from the campaign’s account made it into the photos featured on Flickr under “everyone’s photos.” That’s hard to do and shows the fast rate people were uploading photos through the Flickrup module that Jose built (more on that later in the week).

With so many photos being uploaded and with so many of these photos containing important metadata like the location where the photos were taken, we really wanted to display the photos in an organized way that took advantage of all available data. So we started brainstorming. 

Flickr.com lets you make a Flickr map of your photos, but photos can only be mapped if they've been geotagged using a special machine tag that includes latitude and longitude of where the picture was taken.  This is limiting, and unless you do the geocoding yourself (which can be a little hairy but not too bad), you need a way to geocode the pictures when pulling them back out of Flickr. With such a fast paced campaign like this one, we wanted to use a more straightforward approach. 

That’s when Trippermap came in. Trippermap is a flash widget that gets around the need to tag your photos with latitude and longitude. If there are other location tags on a photo like the name of a country, city, and state or a country and state/province, then Trippermap uses this information to geocode the photo itself and place it on a flash map that you can then embed in your site.  Check out this one from the Stand Up Speak Out campaign:

This is a test of a way to see where our users of the blog are coming from. This is free... I guess we will see if it really begins tomorrow.
For more information go to http://kmi.open.ac.uk/projects/hitmaps/


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