Mapping Hacks

Yesterday i attended a workshop organised by EVNT, the calendar-tagging service. They’d brought together people from different intersecting domains, to talk about best practise for expressing temporal, spatial and related data in RSS and RDF, amongst other things, while a ‘producer’ strand worked on use-cases.

The geohacking contingent was large, and for a while threatened to subsume the more temporal and social themes of the gathering; though all interconnect. For me, the highlight was watching Earle Martin from the Open Guide to London, spending five minutes with Mikel Maron, both tw
eaking their RDF input and output routines to plug OG into Mikel’s new project, mapufacture

For a long time, OpenGuides has published RDF or RSS indexes of Categories and Locales; these days they’d be called tags, i suppose; free-choice keywords which users can attach to nodes. Where there’s a natural classification available - such as common names for different areas of London - the keywords cohere into a kind of consensus (though this is conscientously maintained and updated by the wiki gnomes.

As a simple example, nodes in Holborn - a mapufacture map of everything that some contributor to the Guide decided was in Holborn. It was great to see this come together so quickly.

Ile sans Fil, Montreal’s hyperactive community wireless group, are also carrying out interesting experiments with tag-based web services, adding a flickr tag for each node and pulling out the pictures into their local portal service. Now, as a semantic web geek, i’ve always felt rather ambivalent about tagmania; i can see that it’s fascinating, but find it hard to see what it’s *for*. But applications like EVNT itself, and controllable, instant-gratification use cases like ISF’s, give me hope that we can combine, slowly, the facility of human keywording with the expressiveness and connectability of RDF; perhaps there’s not only a middle way, but it’s in geohacking that we’re finding it.

Posted in worldKit |

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