[Marble-devel] Marble 0.5: The Road ahead

[Torsten Rahn]

Hi Andrew,

On Monday 20 August 2007 13:15:17 Andrew Turner wrote:
> On 8/20/07, Torsten Rahn <torsten.rahn at credativ.de> wrote:
> 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

Thanks for pointing us to it.

> Also - have you considered GeoRSS support for being able to link in
> News feeds, and other geotagged feeds like Flickr?

Yes, while we want to keep the list of standards supported low, GeoRSS is of 
course an essential one that we need to have. 
I think Robert Scott brought up this question during aKademy 2007 and the 
consensus was that we would like to support "GeoRSS Simple" as one of the 
important standards next to GPX and KML. Shouldn't be too hard to add once 
KML is there. The idea was to maybe just translate GeoRSS internally so that 
we just need to work with KML Objects internally.

> 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).

Yes, I've seen it. However the problem was that the Geonames data was licensed 
under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License which is not compatible 
with Debian &-} . So it's unfortunately not an option for usage as a default 
data base that could be shipped with the Marble package (and maybe as part of 
kdelibs or kdesupport one day). 
However it could be used as an optional download, but much more interesting is 
the geotagged Wikipedia version of course, as that one has got references to 
the Wikipedia articles:

> 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.

Yes, we know about that. In fact I have been in close contact with Tim Alder 
who is involved with the Wikipedia Geotagging on how we could best integrate 
the Wikipedia data with Marble. 
So this is exactly where we want to draw our data from once Marble detects 
it's online (the way I described it in my last mail when referring to 
en.wikipedia.org and es.wikipedia.org ). Of course most of the work is to 
strip the data down to something efficient and to actually add the source 
code &-}

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

Yes, that's about data like the one we will probably end up to use. I thought 
about using the VMAP 0 data (as chunks) directly for the actual shapes once 
we will have polished up our vector engine backend (Which is rather a Marble 
0.6 task). Of course we also need a way to import shape files somehow but I'm 
not sure whether we want it to be supported as a "core format" yet (as shape 
files aren't that popular among non-GIS users).

Right now for country shapes we are using the very old MicroWorldDataBase II 
which of course is pretty tiny but got other issues of course.

Thanks for the feedback :-)

Torsten 



>
> Andrew



-- 
 Torsten Rahn

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