[Mapit] Q - people mapping

[Nadim Shaikli]

--- Bernhard Herzog wrote:
> Nadim Shaikli 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.

Great !!!!!

> > 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.

At this point - this minor detail doesn't matter much really.  Ideally
some means would exist (via mouse-movement, clicks, menu, etc) to attain
location-based info (ie. the list of people associated with that location).

> > 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.

When looking at a map of the world (for what I have in mind), a ball-park
closeness factor is good enough :-)  In other words, whether the person
is in Berlin or Dresden is really irrelevant unless the person asking cares
to know more detail (maybe they want to see each other, etc).  In any regard,
I was thinking of having them enter a major city name (or capital of the
country they're in) and running that against a database of known cities.
If that city fell-out (ie. is unknown) the administrator would be notified
that a new entry needs to be entered into the database.  I'm assuming that
plays along with your idea of longitude/latitude -- those values would live
in the db along-side the city name (I'm assuming that info could be gotten
easily on the web and once entered into a mySQL db or equivalent it could
be shared with others on the 'net -- ie. 1 painful experience initialy :-).

  http://www.travelgis.com/default.asp?framesrc=/world/majorcities.asp

Having the subscribers enter their own coordinates is a bit too much - most
if not all would simply not do it.  They'd gladly find their city from a list
of options (pull-down menu or whatever) or type it in (or even click on a map
:-)
 
> > 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.

Would it be something that MapIt! itself would consider useful to have in
its code-base -- in other words, would this option be termed in general
as a "useful" option which people might seek in large numbers ?  I don't
want to suggest something that will only benefit me and so I'm trying to
see if its general and generic enough to be of benefit to others -- it
would really come-in handy as an address-book as well.

I'm not much of a programmer, but I can certainly do the leg work in finding
the coordinates of cities and put them all into a file or something.  I do
think that for this to be generic enough, these coordinates would need to
live along side (if not within) MapIt! itself; so that a user downloading the
package would simply have to select (somehow) the cities he/she chooses and
enters info (or invoke a CGI to have others do it).  It can be used as a
travel diary as well.

Went to Madrid - click on Madrid (text comes up noting what you did there)
Went to Paris  - click on Paris  (text comes up noting what you did there)
etc.

 - Nadim

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