Recently in geocode Category

I've been looking at the relationship between time, content and the flow of history over the past year or so. I've spoken or run sessions about it at eurofoo06, barcamp london 2 and xtech07.

I've been worried about our ability to understand our present after it becomes the past tense. Much of what we read makes sense for a limited timeframe. Time moves on and our context shifts to new current events. So heading back to try to understand the past becomes much harder. The analogy with well commented code springs to mind, maybe my desire is for comments on history. We understand much less of the humour in Shakespeare for this reason. Even moving five years into the past and it can be difficult.

The problem can widen out from here and I'll extend briefly, my context is different to your one, so I want different events and people related together. My family, my work and my friends and interests differ, so unlike code there is not one set of reference points. This is a substantially harder problem, so with that excursion, back to public news content.

I've been researching a proposed microformat hEpoch to deal with time based reference in news stories and I'll admit I've given up. The problem has becomes one of exactitude, stories are written to be read not used as code. Adrian Holovaty has written about this before in his essay on data as journalism. Stories reference past events using terms like "nearby" or "last month", an example story from the BBC. This means that it is currently impossible to make a microformat for linking these stories together. Yet if the data was there then all we need to solve is the time base reference, probably via a bit of POSH.

A good example of this is timelines, they are the pretty, but doomed product I've watched being made many times over. People work hard producing a nice interface and sometimes even separate content from presentation. Then the timeline is often left abandoned once the project or programme finishes. A small bit of care in terms of tags and time formats for news stories and they could auto update.

Time and geographic accuracy need to be flexible, with time we can be somewhat flexible, the hCalendar microformat allows just a year for dstart, which means fixing to a single year is possible, but a approximate date eg 1760s is impossible. I'm not knocking the hCalendar spec, just pointing out a space for new developments. the microformat principles are well defined and do deliver a workable product.

Geographic data is hard too, the geo microformat is superb for specific realtively modern locations, where there is enough context to determine the latitude and longitude for the place. However we frequently need to reference a region, like a city, but cities change over time. The centre of London is now Charing Cross, but it has shifted over time.

This post is entitled "a lament", but really there is a call to action in the tail. We can make this better, all the data exists, it just never makes it out of the editorial process. Similarly when blogging we omit lots of the specifics, as they make it easier to read. eg 06/07/07, how do you unpack that date? It is impossible to know for sure which year, month or day it is.

If you are a publisher then think of the value of being able to automate connecting story threads and managing content by time and location. If you are a tool provider, MarsEdit and MT or WordPress, then offer support for microformats. The same for the more corporate tool providers. If you are an author then think of being able to return to the item of content in months or years and understand the context. This is not easy, but it is possible. Next up, I'll be looking at search, then main user of this data.

Technorati Tags: history, microformat, provenance, time, semantic, journalism, story-telling

I recently discovered that the train companies had managed to get their live running information on the web, based on a pilot of 275 stations from reading notes about the service.
So there are time tables for Forest Hill where I live, Brighton, Charing Cross, London Bridge and virtually every train service for the South and South East.
The service is run by National Rail, who have a nice disclaimer and a full list of every train station in the UK, plus information for WAP and other mobile access.
I have a feeling that this is old news, vague memories of early WAP sites are coming back, but the livedepartureboards site seems newish, National Rail seem to be trying harder to put useful information onto their website. They also have a page with links to lots of timetables, as pdfs mostly.
Moving onto the tube, Transport for London have a very useful realtime tube map, showing what lines are not working and why.
Recently people have been finding odd maps of the tube system, I think they are quite good fun and some of them quite useful. In the tube stations you can buy a map which has a list of which carriages put you opposite the exit for which stations depending on the line you are travlling. eg carriage 4 for north bound Bakerloo line journey between Embankment and Oxford Circus.
There is also the geographic map of the tube, which correlates its shape to the real physical geography of London, the TfL website has a similar map, showing the evolution of the current tube diagram, from this page of Tube maps,
The tube maps with walk lines are similar, all about saving you money and adding layers of extra information on top of a recognised structure. The 3d tube maps are also fun, but non-interactive.

It'd be nice to see someone integrate all of these together with a route planner.
Eg your journey to work today is going to take 20 minutes extra,
Due to delays between London Bridge and Charing Cross, (train information)
Then you should walk from London Bridge to Bank, as Northern Line is congested (tube info)
Bring an umbrella, as rain is forecast and it will be 4 degrees (BBC weather or similar)
Central line is running fine out to White City (tube information)

All of these information resources exist now, but are not in an easy form to integrate. A realtime layered Tube map combining the tube, carriage information and walklines, plus the geographic map of London might be useful too. It would have user controlled switchable layers, with travel and weather information. Kind of a few generations beyond the Tube Guru, which is broken in Safari, but otherwise looks like an interesting service.

I've maybe found a reason to buy a gps unit.... from the newish BBC News magazine. An article on confluence mapping, which is an odd, but very intriguing idea. Essentially you use a GPS unit to get to the point were the latitude and longitude lines intersect and then take a picture of the gps unit screen to prove you got there and take pictures of the view. There are thousands of confluence points around the world and many have already been photographed. It creates a magical picture of the world, giving images of the countryside across the globe.
There are some rules that mean that every intersection does not count, but essentially there is one within 150 miles of you right now. Lots more information is at confluence.org and there is a country by country listing of possible nodes. Virtually every point in Western Europe has been done, but there are plenty left in South America
If you think that this is sounding a bit geeky and dull, the look at the pictures,
map of world, showing thumbnails of pictures taken at confluence points. It is also an interesting narrative reading the stories of people trying to get there and how they managed it.
So I just need a gps unit and then I'm heading back to Chile...

Found this serendipitously whilst googling for something else entirely on blackbeljones, the citypoems project.
You can find signs across the city of Leeds prompting you to send a text message to a number and in return you get sent a poem as a text message written by people who live in Leeds mainly.
Lovely idea I think, using real physical space to cover a city in a virtual overlay of poetry, which is perfect for the medium at the minute. I like these kinds of virtual physical interplays.

I've been updating my IndyMap for early summer trips to Italy and France and using WhereOnEarth to fill in the location details. Phil Gyford links to lots of mapping and geocoding resources on the basis of a conference he went to recently. The Indy Junior site has a lot of largely us resources for this too, at bottom of page.
I've put the map on the new where page off the homepage.
Lastly, with the recent earthquakes in Japan and Algeria here are some earthquake resources. There is an interesting experiment that happens in California, getting people to respond to "did you feel it", which creates an emotional intensity map of the quake. UPDATE: Here are the community internet intensity maps for the top ten quakes in California. I think that this is an interesting form of geocoding, mapping the real world to shared virtual view of world, which can be compared against the scientific data for the actual quake. There is a USGS fact sheet on these maps and the progamme now extends across the US and they are capturing world data, but not yet mapping it.

• Edinburgh host the worldwide earthquake locator
  
• the US Geological Survey host a different world quake map