devlog

I am experiencing a bout of that same compulsion to verbiage that must bother regular bloggers daily - a kind of blogohrrea. Having exhausted the patience of my irc friends, i turn to the web as a verbal outlet.

In theory, times are very interesting. Semantic web projects with a spatial aspect, that i’ve been tinkering with in London for years, finally seem to be gluing at the edges; over the next couple of months we’ve set ourselves some quite ambitious goals, and i’ll be happy if we can achieve two-thirds of them. Sites like the Open Guide to London, EVNT, wirelesslondon, long due a biggish upgrade and code release. Mapserver problems… :/

We had talks accepted for the upcoming Mapserver User Meeting/OSGeo conference in June. I’m glad to have the opportunity to talk about open map creation in the context of geodata policy. This appears to be going fairly well; better than i could have hoped, even. My other OSGeo schtick is on integrating RDF with WFS, particularly WFS-T to allow enhanced metadata for collaborative map annotation / editing; i’m thinking about organising a BoF on that wiki-nature subject; there’s been a lot of it about lately.

I’ve been working on this bbox, RDF aggregator with spatial index; still slapping features onto it that for politeness and conciseness sake it can’t do without. Apart from the spatial index, it’s no more than a common or garden RSS/RDF aggregator. I’ve been wondering about interfaces to it. For a long time we’ve been talking about this ontomatic, an RDF-schema driven interface generator that would take a lot of the grind out of writing web applications, and be able to deal with diverse and unpredictable data sources in an intelligent and useful way. The compression of too many years at the corporate code-face writing web-based content management systems has informed this foolish, bitter endeavour. In theory we have ‘everything sketched out’ for it. Meanwhile, writing a specialised interface now feels a little bit forlorn. But i need better ways of peering into bbox’s brain and examining its recent activities, denser than irc will allow.

The people who form part of what i occasionally think of as my distributed irc brain have gone all poetic on me, too; cf:

this is a sit back and motionlessly observe moment to watch
patterns associated normally only with early weather shifts

or compellingly,

Snatch a burning flower from the sky, sculpt it in glass.

At one point around the New Year, i seemed to be having a conversation about community currencies with a different person approximately once a week. Now we’re organising a LETS Get Together featuring three or four different software projects and several local LETS organisers and agitators. So far it’s been fascinating and stimulating, though i have yet to get practically to grips with a LETS system myself; perhaps some software to scratch, will facilitate this. The second LETS get together is on April 28th…

LETS is something i’ve been intrigued by since i met Hugh, but never had a use case for. I still come at it from the abstract-representation, standards angle. There’s a de facto standard called MRS for managing registration and transaction between many different currencies; Hugh’s been working out an XML version of its ASCII looking protocol, i think, and there’s strong potential for RESTful web service type interfaces.

My suggestion to run a LETS as a way of managing distributed finances for the World Summit on Free Information Infrastructures fell on a stony set unresponsive deaf ears. I’d at least like to make community exchange systems a big track at WSFII, though. I’m also hoping to use the chance to have workshop support for nearly-free, to get a lot of open map and open source GIS hackers together for a few days.

What else? Free Networks, as that’s what WSFII is hinged on and where the
conference comes from. But we’re attempting to be very catholic in our
definition of free
information infrastructures; the ideal is to bring a lot of people from
different domains together, and figure out / demonstrate where the edges
meet.