geotagging
Flickr adds support for geocoding
The popular photo sharing website Flickr introduced native support for geotagging photos on Monday.
Because of the flexibility of the system, there have been a number of options around for a while that have allowed users to geotag their photos. None of them have been quite as simple as Flickr have just made it though. And it's great to see that the guy that built the first geotagging mashup of Flickr and Google Maps - Rev Dan Catt - was actually the person that Yahoo recruited to build up the geotagging functionality within the site itself.
The new geotagging system is really easy to use, it's functional and it's pretty at the same time. It also has a geotagging API that developers can plug into if they wish.
The thing that surprises me is the lack of support for GeoRSS in their feeds. With all this location information flying around (1.2 million photos geotagged within the first day) it would make sense to include that geodata in the RSS feeds from the site. I'd really like to be able to pull geotagged photos from my Flickr stream into my geoblog and photos section over at geodan.org and have their location information automatically assigned based on the information stored against them in Flickr.
You can also see my map of photos on Flickr.
Location-based functionality within Drupal
Having laid out last week some of the overall location-related functionality I'd like to see within Drupal, I wanted to start a proper list of areas around which I would like to see development within the Drupal community. I'll be putting effort into creating and improving many of these, and hopefully working with others who want to help as well.
I've broken down the functionality into three sections of the data flow - incoming data, internal processing and display, outgoing data and external systems. Please feel free to leave comments on which bits you'd like to see sooner rather than later, and any extra functionality that I've missed off the list.
- Incoming data
- Ability to tag individual nodes in system with location information
- by address (functionality already exists)
- by clicking map
- by coordinates
- Ability to extract location information from EXIF tags in jpg images
- Ability to automatically extract location of items from incoming feeds
- from RSS feeds (using the geo namespace or GeoRSS implementation)
- from KML feeds?
- from GML feeds?
- Internal processing and display
- Ability to search near location
- by address (currently can search near zipcodes only)
- by city/country
- by clicking on map (or entering coordinates)
- Listing of similaraly tagged nodes nearby
- Mapping
- Simple visualisation
- Mapping nodes on top of imagery
- Google Maps
- Yahoo Maps
- Maps from a GIS (eg MapServer)
- GIS functionality
- Point in polygon analysis (for example, to find which region a point lies in - useful for determining which country a pair of coordinates lies in, or which administrative district a point lies in)
- Community map creation
- creating and editing of maps (using Community MapBuilder)
- display of maps
- Map of nodes with ability to filter by users, buddies, location, etc
- Outgoing data
- Export any Drupal page as a feed (or layer) - e.g. search terms, tags, node types etc
- RSS feeds with location imformation embedded
- KML feeds
- GML layers (using WFS from OGC to allow data output capabilities to be determined)
- Ability to filter by geographic location, user, content type etc
- Ability to export single points
- links to maps (functionality already exists)
- link to Google Earth placemark (complete)
- External systems
- Creation of a geocoding system that can be accessed and queried by other systems (including Drupal) through a RESTful style XML interface - similar to Mikel Maron's geocoder
updated 16th February 2006
