Development Seed Blog

Using fresh, quality ingredients to geocode, geotag, and geoviews your news

We are currently working on a project for a disaster relief organization. Our client was interested in mapping aggregated disaster relief news over a map. This is something of a mini-project in itself, but a combination of awesome modules and some custom pieces made this job a relatively straightforward process.

The goal:

fig.1: A map with new stories + prominent country tags

fig.2: Click a map point to see the headline

The recipe:

• 40 disaster relief organization news feeds: These will serve as the raw sources for our news page — they provide the titles, stories and urls

• Yahoo Pipes: Mixes up and mashes together these 40 feeds into a few feeds for us to aggregate. In addition, it will geocode stories when it can, adding geo:lat and geo:lon tags to rss items.

• FeedAPI: The same core feed aggregation engine we are using on Managing News and other projects.

• FeedAPI Geo: A simple FeedAPI plugin I hacked together to tag a geocoded item with its respective country (in development, to be released soon)

• Geonames: A great API module that lets you hook into the free geonames service — FeedAPI Geo is using this to reverse-lookup a country name from a lat/lon point.

• Graphite: A custom mapping stack that allows nodes with a CCK lat/lon field to be mapped onto a simple CSS/XHTML based map with JavaScript popups. It provides a Views plugin, so all you do is choose the nodes you want, add the appropriate CCK lat/lon field, choose the graphite view style, and voila your nodes are on the map. (in development, to be released soon, expect delays)

• Tagadelic + Tagadelic Views: Two bread + butter tag visualization modules that let us take our country tags and show story distribution.

Bake in the oven for 45 minutes.

Beautiful!