[Marble-devel] Marble 0.5: The Road ahead

[Andrew Turner]

Hi all, well done on Marble 0.4. A couple of thoughts I thought that I
would toss in as you roadmap the next version. Especially in terms of
geodata formats and their future.

On 8/20/07, Torsten Rahn <torsten.rahn at credativ.de> wrote:
>
> 2. Initial support of KML style objects (icon style, label style)

KML is currently undergoing revision for KML 3 that will have some
minor changes (geometry will be stored in a slightly different format,
GML Simple). But also possibly large changes to styling. You can check
out the discussion going on amongst blogs, tags, and the OGC here:
   http://www.ogcnetwork.net/kmltalk

So you may want to consider how you'll implement KML for future
support, or perhaps wait a couple of months to see what shakes out of
it.

In addition, if you have any suggestions for what you'd like to see in
KML - functionality, format, etc. Please speak up! :)

Also - have you considered GeoRSS support for being able to link in
News feeds, and other geotagged feeds like Flickr?
> The latter is rather unfortunate but I think we can live without it for the
> 0.5 release.
>
> There are two more show stoppers for 0.5 which are not on the kml-tasks list:
>
> 3. Translation of KML files which is pretty much needed for KDE 4. The idea to
> solve this problem was to use Wikipedia's data as an online download and get
> their individual language data of the cities for translation. So a user who
> is from spain would have a database of cities downloaded in the background
> which is compiled from the city data from http://es.wikipedia.org/ and
> http://en.wikipedia.org/. That means: http://en.wikipedia.org/ has the
> largest amount of cities among all languages (about 160.000) The data base
> compiled for spanish would contain those city names from en.wikipedia.org
> with the ones that also exist in http://es.wikipedia.org/ replacing the
> entries from http://en.wikipedia.org/ to make sure that they get properly
> translated. This is just the rough idea.
> I'll take care of compiling the data needed (with input from Tim Alder from
> Wikipedia).

Have you seen the GeoNames database? http://geonames.org
It is a free open database of locations, in as many languages as
possible (so both exonyms & endonyms for locations).

It also has an geotagged version of wikipedia:
http://www.geonames.org/maps/wikipedia.html

And it's either downloadable, or you can use the web service API.

>
> 4. Country support: For initial very basic country support it would be nice if
> we'd just add countries as "invisible" placemarks (i.e. placemarks with no
> symbols). Problems:
> - Where do we take the country data from (needs to have a Debian compliant
> license)? This isn't too hard to solve though.

World boundary files:
http://www.cipotato.org/DIVA/data/MoreData.htm


Andrew

-- 
Andrew Turner
ajturner at highearthorbit.com      42.2774N x 83.7611W
http://highearthorbit.com              Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA
Introduction to Neogeography - http://oreilly.com/catalog/neogeography