ZoneMaps
Yahoo Research’s World Explorer was recently released! The semantic mapping of the world is something i’m very interested in. It overlaps nicely with my goal to bring an added value context and narrative to people out in the world, participating in the everyday. Today I got the TagMaps API talking to my cell phone. I wanted to try to do this with Java but Python is my strength and there will be plenty of time to do it in Java. Rapid prototyping proof of concept means Python.
I want to overlap our world, known as RL when we’re chatting, with the landmarks of this collectively defined virtual world. Using the TagMaps infrastructure coupled with location information, I think I can bring this new context to people through their mobile phones. The Flickr community is large enough where there is data for a lot of places. A much smarter path than trying to build up the critical mass with my own custom application. Using the basic framework I built today, I can provide walks and tours through places deemed noteworthy. I can show photos taken in the place you are standing but a month ago, I can give you the ‘vibe’ of a location.
Today I wrote a cell phone app that talks to a GPS device and passed that information to a server. The server converts the GPS data and passes the coordinates to Tag Maps. Tag Maps then returns the most popular tags for that location. I then pick the closest tag to my location and ask Flickr for a photo for that tag. Here’s where it breaks down. I need to give Flickr both a tag and a lat/long but I haven’t figured out how to pass the lat/long to Flickr. The World Explorer flash tool does it somehow so there is a way. Right now I just pass Flickr the tag. Flickr gives me an image back and I pass it back up the chain to the phone. Once I figure out how to pass lat/long to Flickr, the photo appearing on the user’s phone will be relative to both the popular tags and the exact location of the individual. (I figured this part out, thanks Rahul!)
Oh and I almost forgot to mention the nightmare of converting an HTML page to an image on my ISPs box. I really need to move somewhere where I can have root. I ended up converting an html page to a PDF and then from there using Imagemagick to convert the PDF to a GIF. It isn’t pretty but it works.
