Blog: Maps

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!

Putting News Stories on the Map

We’ve long wanted our team aggregator and media analyzer Managing News to automatically geotag the news that it tracks. But getting this to happen presented some interesting questions and challenges. What does it mean to put a news story on map? Should it show where the news is coming from or what part of the world is being talked about?

We decided that in the case of Managing News and the people using it to monitor the news, it’s more important to map what the news is about. We want to be able to show a map that people can look at and immediately know what is being talked about – like in this map, showing news tracked about several key financial institutions activities.

But this raised more questions. How can you geocode the content of a news item, and could we do this meaningfully? And most importantly, how do we identify locations in a stream of text?

Two Widgets We Used to Show Off Photos on StandAgainstPoverty.org

At the height of the UN Millennium Campaign's Stand Up Speak Out campaign last week, a ton of photos were uploaded to StandAgainstPoverty.org in just one day. So many in fact, that at least one photo from the campaign’s account made it into the photos featured on Flickr under “everyone’s photos.” That’s hard to do and shows the fast rate people were uploading photos through the Flickrup module that Jose built (more on that later in the week).

With so many photos being uploaded and with so many of these photos containing important metadata like the location where the photos were taken, we really wanted to display the photos in an organized way that took advantage of all available data. So we started brainstorming. 

Flickr.com lets you make a Flickr map of your photos, but photos can only be mapped if they've been geotagged using a special machine tag that includes latitude and longitude of where the picture was taken.  This is limiting, and unless you do the geocoding yourself (which can be a little hairy but not too bad), you need a way to geocode the pictures when pulling them back out of Flickr. With such a fast paced campaign like this one, we wanted to use a more straightforward approach. 

That’s when Trippermap came in. Trippermap is a flash widget that gets around the need to tag your photos with latitude and longitude. If there are other location tags on a photo like the name of a country, city, and state or a country and state/province, then Trippermap uses this information to geocode the photo itself and place it on a flash map that you can then embed in your site.  Check out this one from the Stand Up Speak Out campaign:

As I fired off requests to Google's geocoder API to plot several thousand points on a map for a recent project, a quick calculation showed that only about a third of the data returned valid latitude and longitude information. The data set I was dealing with was international - mapping members from nearly every country - so I knew I would have some issues, but only a third successful?