I Can See My House From Here!
Nathan Torkington
Aug. 27, 2004 10:15 AM
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At Euro Foo Camp last week, I found some fun people and a lot of new things to learn. I couldn't get to everything, but as people blog their notes and put pages onto the wiki, I'm learning even more. For example, Schuyler and Jo lead a mapping session, which I missed, but via Mary Branscombe's weblog I found two very cool URLs.
geocoder.us uses the Perl module Geo::Coder::US to turn street names into latitude/longitude. Big deal? Yes. Latitude-Longitude is what everyone uses to identify locations, so if you want to play with geo tools then you need to get your data into Lat-Long format to get it between apps.
What apps? Apps like mapper.acme.com, which uses Microsoft TerraServer data to show you an overhead photo of a given point. And yes, it doesn't take addresses. But with the lat-long from geocoder, you can peer down on anything you like to a resolution of 1m/pixel. Sweet!
The data's not particularly fresh, which can make it even cooler. I found a snapshot of our subdivision as it was being built: lots of empty lots where now there are prairie palaces backed up to each other to the maximum density permitted by zoning. And the neighbourhood park before it was a park and it was just scungy dirt and grass by a mosquito-filled lake. (I can't actually see the mosquitos on the lake, what with them not having 1m wingspan and all ...)
Why my interest in this? I started playing with OSXplanet. I added a label for my home town in New Zealand (the net amazes me: I googled for leigh new zealand latitude longitude and the 4th hit had a pointer to the info I wanted. Now I can see night and day pass over the world as I work--I can tell when my friends in London will be going to sleep (as though their gradual disappearance from my AIM buddy list wasn't a clear enough sign) and when my parents in New Zealand will be waking up.
Geography was always a subject I avoided in high school, along with history and biology. I went for English, math, and the hard sciences and loved to read books like Men of Mathematics so I could pretend I'd be following in the footsteps of Gauss and Euler. Now I'm older and definitely not on the hard science track, I'm paying more attention to the subjects I missed in high school: I got interest in biology again when we did the Bioinformatics Conference, I've been reading a lot about Roman history and history of science like Connections, and now I'm finding my interest piqued in the literal world around me.
I can't wait for Schuyler and Jo's Mapping Hacks to be done. Right now my problem is that I don't know what's possible, only that I want to explore this interesting space. I can't wait for a guide book!
--Nat
Nathan Torkington
is conference planner for the Open Source Convention, OSCON Europe, and other O'Reilly conferences. He was project manager for Perl 6, is on the board of The Perl Foundation, and is a frequent speaker on open source topics. He cowrote the bestselling Perl Cookbook.
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