Will

Comments: porting, interface-ing

O.k. so what is this? A personal path-log? Is the conent dynamic?

Posted by SEDinehart at July 6, 2004 5:05 PM

yeah, the content is dynamic, based on where you've been -- right now I'm just working with one path for testing purposes, but a simple flip of a switch, and you'll be able to do much more with different paths -- project page is: patholog.org

Posted by will at July 6, 2004 5:13 PM

Hey, so when we did PDPal the intergration between the PDA (we were using Palms, sadly) and the Flash interface was to translate the PDA data into an XML structure, which Flash could read fairly easily, although there were caching and other issues related to maintaining geographic registration between the the "locales" and "routes" on the PDA with that on the Flash visualizer. (pixel->lat/lon translations and registration between the two physical map illustrations which, for various reasons, didn't precisely match.)
Here's an example of a user's data:
http://pdpal.fatdonut.com/pdpalfu/get_user.jsp?id=29&fulldoc=true&map_id=2

Something I wish we had done was to structure the data to be readable via an RSS or RDF feed, perhaps with a namespace extension that would support representing paths. There's a namespace extension described here: http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/
But I'm not sure it includes support for paths. The interesting possibility with an "open" structure is that you provide a mechanism for other visualization tools to plug into the data.

Posted by julian at July 8, 2004 9:17 AM

thanks julian, I will take a look at this stuff. when we structured the data, we just stuffed it into a database. I played around with xml for a bit, but then retreated to just making simple db calls to output the paths. the rdf/rss structure is a good idea -- something that I think we could pursue with this data as well...

Posted by will at July 8, 2004 11:37 AM

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