Greg Sadetsky [05.31.05 03:35 PM]

Sorry if this is obvious, but gmaptrack is actually a repository of user-created maps plotted onto Google Maps. For every new location added, it's possible to specify a title, description text, marker (there is a bigger inventory of them that the default ones used by Google Maps), etc. It's even possible to import XML files containing locations...

  gnat [05.31.05 04:06 PM]

Thanks. I wasn't thinking beyond the BBC Backstage hacking, and hadn't realized the greater extent of gmaptrack. Is there an output service other than displaying on Google Maps? It seems like the real gold is the aggregation of user annotations. Sites like are sinks, but not sources: where's the web service that lets me aggregate other people's waypoints into my own app?

  Ben O'Neill [06.01.05 05:05 AM]

Another "Map of the News" is available at: http://boneill.ninjagrapefruit.com/wp-content/bbc/newmaps/

It was crashing IE at one point (due to IE's lack of love for alpha channels in PNG files), but it's all working again now.

  Stephen Miller [06.02.05 05:46 AM]

With regards to the sport map, you are correct that it would be better with town info etc, hopefully I can add this when the postcode API becomes available on backstage.

The main reason behind the prototype was not so much giving the sport information as to work out a way of finding closest things from a database from a given point. Football teams have fixed points of reference rather than areas (such as news for a county), future prototypes will no doubt carry different data.

The great thing about the BBC's initiative, is whilst nothing hugely new has been offered, it gives a place for people to bounce ideas on the messageboards, and just have a bit of fun testing things.

  Olly Jackson [06.02.05 06:03 AM]

Thanks for the props Nat :)
I'm working on lots of future improvements to the service.

  gnat [06.02.05 08:49 AM]

Stephen, thanks for the explanation. I agree about Backstage: it's not that the data is fantastically valuable, but it's a live stream of machine-usable interesting information that we humble Internet hackers wouldn't otherwise have access to. It spans many dimensions (time, space, topic, format) and really opens the doors to experimentation. Kudos, BBC.

Your "find the nearest thing from this point" will come in handy when things like EVDB and upcoming get a lot of content around you. Often I don't want to find out what's going on in a particular areacode (which can be anything from 2 to 200 blocks in size), I want to find the nearest industrial/classical/bluegrass/musical show near a place: I'll drive two hours to hear Bela Fleck play.

Re: geocoding, I've found that Google makes a good geocoder. I hacked the code slightly to include the GET in the Perl code (you'll need LWP installed for this to work):

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;

use LWP::Simple;

my $str = shift || die "usage: $0 address\n";

$str = escape($str);

my $var = get("http://maps.google.com/maps?q=$str");

$var=~s/.*(lat=\"-?\d+\.\d+\" lng=\"-?\d+\.\d+").*/$1/gs;

print "$var\n";

sub escape {

  my($toencode) = @_;

  $toencode=~s/([^a-zA-Z0-9_\-. ])/uc sprintf("%%%02x",ord($1))/eg;

  $toencode =~ tr/ /+/; # spaces become pluses

  return $toencode;

}

It even works on UK addresses. At least, it grokked "London SW1".

  Stephen Miller [06.02.05 09:26 AM]

Hi Nat,

Scraping google is certainly an easy way to get addresses, but not as quick as having a local database or similar. Thanks for the script, although I have already constructed a similar one in PHP.

The other thing worth considering with such an approach is whether to cache searches for future reference, although this could get messy with slightly similar but different searches.

For example, UK postcodes are limited to a set range, thus they may come up again and again in a search, and scraping google would be slower and require more bandwidth than caching these repeated requests locally.

As far as the events databases go, my friend Duncan who has also produced a few map prototypes (all of them can be found at http://backstage.min-data.co.uk/) already was planning to get the BBC to reintroduce some entertainment feeds to attempt this for the UK. Thanks for those links, its certainly something we will look into soon.

Any other ideas etc are very much appreciated! :)

  morfey [12.26.05 12:48 PM]

It was crashing IE at one point (due to IE's lack of love for alpha channels in PNG files), but it's all working again now.

  Tim Almond [12.26.05 04:34 PM]

I've written a simple python script which tells me of any traffic problems on the M4 motorway (which I travel a huge amount on). I wrote it to have a tinker with Backstage, and also to try python programming on my phone.

You can get it from my website.

  Lee Rickler [04.08.06 10:13 AM]

DigiLondon is a new way to find location based information in London. Using up to the minute satellite technologies like Google Earth and Google Maps and Wikipedia you can find out about hundreds of major London locations in seconds.