[kde-edu]: Intent to move Marble into KDE-EDU

[Torsten Rahn]

Oops, I'm currently in a hurry, so here again with fewer bugs:

On Wednesday 07 March 2007 19:28:34 Albert Astals Cid wrote:
> How is wikipedi integration done? Are you parsing the html or using the
> webservices api?

Well wikipedia integration currently means that:

- Marble does already make a "good guess" about the URL for the cities.
- Marble will be able to download further information to download the correct 
URLs and all the locations that are georeferenced. I'm currently in touch 
with Tim Adler from Wikipedia who is also interested in Marble and who has 
helped me during Chemnitzer LinuxTage to figure out the best solutions to 
access Wikipedia's data (the best method is accessing the SQL databas in some 
cases). This will allow to have localized entries. We are also trying to 
figure out possible license issues, but that's a different topic which I'll 
tackle in some way (the current data I use is "debian-safe" and is already 
packaged in debian).

I'm in contact with Tim Adler to extend this even more.

> Well, i agree it's wrong in filesize, but imho the format is flexible
> enough, i mean, i have 47 maps on SVN contributed by people != me and some
> more (around 20) lying in the HD waiting to be checked and commited.

And? This is about as "right" as letting volunteers create 60 screenshots 
of a PDF document  and trying to claim that looking at them in a bitmap viewer 
would be a good replacement for looking at the actual PDF in Okular ;-) .

Seriously, it's as easy to create custom data (using Inkscape). For the data 
you have it's even easier as that data already exists in vector format and 
just needs to be added to marble. And even more important, it's more 
flexible: Your maps use different projections (without a way to tell which 
ones), you can't zoom in, move left, or right, or do other stuff. 
With marble you can reuse the same vector data to create timezone maps, 
topographical maps, political maps, weather data, temperature maps, humidity 
maps, etc., you can just display certain countries only etc.

Torsten