[bndfc-web-tech] Re: [FEATURE REQUEST] MKDoc 1.8 Events component

[Bruno Postle]

Just clarifying how this might work..

On Wed 28-Jul-2004 at 16:44 +0100, Bruno Postle wrote:

> In fact all this can all be reduced to just two new components:

Time Component
--------------

* Time Zone
* Start Date      Hour Minute Day Month Year
* End Date        Hour Minute Day Month Year

Place Component
---------------

* Position

The 'Position' field would be the decimal latitude and longitude, 
this is actually really easy to obtain for pretty much anywhere.

For example the postcode for our office is S11 8YL; if you go to 
<http://www.multimap.com/> and paste this into the search field, it 
tells you that our coordinates are 53.3661, -1.4913.

Coordinates can also be easily read from GPS devices.

Stuff we can do with the position data
--------------------------------------

* Put a link to a map next to the event - Given the coordinates, a 
  map to get to our office is here:

    http://www.multimap.com/map/browse.cgi?lat=53.3661&lon=-1.4913&icon=x

* Add metadata to the event/document that can be picked up by 
  search-engines.  This would look like this:

    <meta name="ICBM" content="53.3661, -1.4913">
    <meta name="geo.position" content="53.3661;-1.4913">

  Unfortunately the GeoURL search engine <http://geourl.org> is down 
  at the moment, but previously it was possible to do a search for 
  sites near to any particular location - We could potentially add 
  similar functionality to the MKDoc internal search engine.

  There is also an RDF vocabulary: <http://placetime.com/>

* Search for nearby consume.net wireless nodes:

    http://consume.net/nodedb.php?pos_x=433846&pos_y=385620

    (note these coordinates are national-grid-references, but the 
    conversion isn't too difficult)

* We could potentially automatically determine the timezone field 
  based on the position:

    http://search.cpan.org/src/AUTRIJUS/Geography-Country-Utils-1.06/lib/Geography/Country/TZ.pm

-- 
Bruno