Who Is Apache?. A nice little project is being worked on by the Apache committers to help map where everybody is. [The James Duncan Davidson Weblog]
A creative application of the GeoUrls concept, to foster community communication. I'd expect more of these to be created over time.
I'd invoke the LazyWeb to create a little service that would take a foaf file as an entry and generate the map.
I would architect it in 2 scripts:
- foafToGeo
Reads foaf file, extracts property http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/page or homepage, + relevant data that you want to present on the map as title for points (firstname + lastname + email for example)
When exist looks up homepage for an ICBM header tag
Generate a file (need to define a standard xml syntax for it) with:
title, href, long, lat
- the second script, let's call it GeoToMap
takes the file in input and outputs a html or svg file with points on a map with titles and urls. It could be customizable, to specify a stylesheet and maybe other stuff.
This could be extended later to create a geographic foaf browser: input your foaf file, the href will point to the foaf file of people, which would be fed to the service again.
This could answer some questions like: where are the friends of my friends located. Also this could be very easily used to generate automatically a map like the Apache one for all sourceforge projects.
I definitely need to take some time off someday to play with all these cool ideas: in the meantime, if you like the idea, be my guest :-)
4:23:54 PM 
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