Dear all,
I've been working on the Open Correspondence site in terms of porting
the original idea and now trying to do the bug fixes.
The site has 918 letters in it which we are exposing in JSON, XML (very,
very basic), and RDF with a really basic endpoint and a nearly installed
Xapian search engine. So the text, I feel, is catered for and I'm sure
that the various things that we're working on will expose faults or show
other sorts of information that I haven't thought of yet.
One of the things that I wanted to look at in Open Correspondence is the
spatial and temporal information that exists in the letters. I've only
had a brief look at the letters but I've sort of been aware of the
temporal bits of information like the dates that the letters were
written and the possibilities of using Simile to provide varying types
of indexes and timelines. Perhaps there's a better way of doing it...
However there is also a fair amount of 'spatial' information not only in
the letterheads but also in places mentioned in the text and his
travels. I was having a quick scan of the letters to Wilkie Collins[1]
and Dickens wrote from the US, France, Kent and London over the 16 year
correspondence. I suspect that there is a more interesting query in, for
example, following one of this American tours and who he wrote to from
where.
I had thought of trying to use Google maps to show the data for Collins
but I'm sure that there is a better way of doing it. I certainly cannot
remember thinking or visualising data this way when I was doing my
degree (though letters were a curiously ignored format through the course).
The RDF endpoint does not expose the geographical data yet as I'm not
sure of the best / most useful ontology to use though browsing there is
some W3C work and opengeospatial has various vocabularies / ontologies
that could be used. I think that there is some great stuff that could
be done with it and some interesting software built with it that goes
beyond simple geocoding (as outlined above re: Google maps).
It is not an area that I have much experience in yet (but it does seem
that both MySQL and Postgresql support GIS to some degree though again
better tools may exist) but any advice, pointers and so on gratefully
received.
All best,
Iain
blog: austgate.co.uk
skype: iainemsley
mob: 07723 992492
1
http://www.opencorrespondence.org/letters/view/dickens/Mr%20W%20Wilkie%20Collins
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