[Mapit] Q - people mapping

[Bernhard Herzog]

Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo.com> writes:

> I'm administering a couple of mail-lists in which from time-to-time people
> get into a frenzy about wanting to know where each other are, which got
> me to thinking.
> 
> Could I use Mapit (or a modification there-of or in association with
> another application - sunclock/xearth, etc) in which I could show a map
> of the world with subscribers' physical location highlighted somehow
> (flag, red-dot, whatever).

In principle, yes.

> Let me walk through an example of what I had in mind;
> 
> let's assume I have 5 subscribers to my list (let's make it simple :-)
> 
>  person-1 in Cairo,	Egypt
>  person-2 in Berlin,	Germany
>  person-3 in San Jose,	USA
>  person-4 in Penang, 	Malaysia
>  person-5 in Dallas,	USA
> 
> now when anyone asks where people are I'd simply put out the URL which
> displays a flat earth view (all continents) with five red dots (one per
> physical location of people listed above - done auto-magically somehow) --
> when a user puts his/her mouse over the red dot the user's name, email,
> phone, whatever else shows-up in a list-like format (in case there are
> multiple subscribers in the same city). 

If you meant that the pop-up should appear when you simply move the
mouse over the marker (instead of clicking on it) then it would require
some changes to MapIt! so that the generated HTML page contains the
right Java-Script for that.

An alternative would be to have the URL attached to a marker point to a
web-page with the information.

> As a simplification, instead of
> mapping into cities, how about starting out with simply lumping people in
> the same country together.  So in the case of person 3 & 5 above, one
> single dot in the middle of the USA map would do for now.

That's basically just a matter of how accurate the locations are or how
you let the subscribers specify their position. The easiest approach
would perhaps be to let the subscribers specifiy their longitude and
latitude directly and perhaps offer them some help in finding suitable
coordinates for their cities.

> I also think that this would be very popular with ANY and ALL
> mailing-lists.  What I'm getting at is that I think you'd see lots of
> people interested in downloading such a package and using it, be it
> for mailing-lists or even for personal-use (phone-book, travel journal,
> etc).
> 
> Is that possible ? how ? comments ?

It's certainly possible. How it can be done depends a lot on what you
start with. In the case of the mailing list you have to have a way for
the subnscribers to specifiy their positions and you have to get that
information into MapIt!. The easiest way for to achieve the latter would
be to automatically generate the markerdefs file regurlary or whenever
the location database changes.

   Bernhard

-- 
Intevation GmbH                                 http://intevation.de/
Sketch                                 http://sketch.sourceforge.net/
MapIt!                                               http://mapit.de/