This is sort of interesting to me. I'd say my site - www.trailbehind.com - is doing something similar. We're trying to index all public geo-data and related information (like trip reports).
We've bent over backwards to make our places searchable and linkable. If you turn off Javascript and look at a page like http://www.trailbehind.com/Yosemite National Park/, you'll see that we have created a textual representation of the data we index to the map. With JavaScript turned on, you can download all the underlying geo-data (our waypoint and trail overlays, not the tiles). RThis week, we'll also add boundaries for national parks and forests. Almost all of our traffic comes from people searching for places names. Andrew On Sun, Jul 12, 2009 at 9:00 AM, Bill Thoen <[email protected]> wrote: > Sean Gillies wrote: > >> It's curious how alien the concept of geographic entities identified by >> URIs is to GIS folks. See Adena Schutzberg (not a programmer, but no dummy) >> scramble to make sense of it: >> >> http://apb.directionsmag.com/archives/6086-Linked-Geodata-OSM-Gets-Linkable.html. >> For all the talk of "GeoWeb" in GIS, we still don't quite get the web. >> > Well, when you pack 80 lbs of baggage into a 20lb suitcase, it makes that > suitcase surprisingly hard to lift. With sentences like this one: > > "LinkedGeoData currently comprises RDF dumps, Linked Data and REST > interfaces, links to DBpedia as well as a prototypical user interface for > linked-geo-data browsing and authoring." > > you're not going to reach a very wide audience. The unprepared mind chokes > on these gobbets of concepts, packed so tightly in one sentence. Adena's > right to point out that most of us have to look up about every third word in > that announcement and even then it's still hard to make sense of it. Of > course, that announcement isn't meant for everyone, but it reminds > knowlessmen like me that GIS on the web can get complicated. And as long as > it remains portrayed as that complicated, we're not likely to get anywhere > until Google simplifies it and shows us how it's done, like they did with > web mapping a couple of years ago. > > In fact, that's happening already. Look around and you'll see a growing > number of interesting mash-ups with a Google map component being developed > by people with little or no GIS experience. People who don't know the > difference between large and small-scale maps, or which one's the longitude > in a coordinate, or what "geocoding" means, are coming up with some pretty > clever and innovative mash-ups where location plays a part. If GISers (or > geowankers) focus too closely on the minutia of standards and protocols > instead of what they're for, we'll get caught flat-footed again. (But it was > amusing seeing the dominant GIS companies come up off their beds of laurels > and scramble to come up with a plausible response as to why they didn't get > there first!) > > - Bill Thoen > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Geowanking mailing list > [email protected] > http://geowanking.org/mailman/listinfo/geowanking_geowanking.org >
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