devlog

Back in London for a while after a year’s absence, i find myself re-involved in a longstanding project to rebuild the consume.net node database and documentation set in a fashion that should include lots of RDF metadata for nodes, an Open Guide and a feedback mechanism to help get people involved in local mentorings.

As it’s got a little dollop of arts funding, there have to be funky community-arts projects somehow anchoring off it. By far the best suggestion i’ve heard is from pete gomes: oranges and lemons, persuading some of the network of churches in the old nursery rhyme and ones nearby to host 802.11 access points on their spires, with an aim to bootstrapping the long-dreamt-of wireless backbone in the east end.

The song (oranges and lemons, say the bells of st. clements…) describes a conversational messaging system between the different sets of church bells. Some are long gone, lost in the war or to redevelopment, and the line of sight between them that enabled clear audio signalling obscured now by towerblocks. But it’s still a lovely idea. To that end, i sat down with streetmap and teoma and made some descriptons of the church network: an RDF file describing the churches and their locations, and a simple SVG plot of their relative locations. Stepney seems to be an outlier.

When i start wanting a basemap and a web service like mapbureau with a free API, i realise that i’m not in Kansas any more, as it were. Lack of public domain geodata in europe used to be an ideological irritant; now it’s a pressing daily hindrance.