Check out my post on GeoRSS Metadata over at the GeoRSS blog. Looking for some feedback and ideas on how to use the featuretypetag and relationshiptag elements of a GeoRSS entry. We’d like to put something into GeoPress to support them, but need to know what users would expect and want to use to refer to locations and tag them.

activeCollab is an easy to use, web based, open source collaboration and project management tool. It’s BaseCamp, but free of charge and open-source. And I actually possess all of my own data.

Setup took a whopping 10 minutes (including waiting for the DNS of the MySQL database to propagate, and adding some accounts). You can setup projects, add users, limit users to specific projects, and add clients. It even looks really great, which is entirely not-normal for an Open-Source project, which is usually very innovative/solid, but looks like old white toast.

I don’t think it supports the nice API’s and such that BaseCamp does, but it’s an actively developed project, so hopefully it shows up soon.

I’ve been rather incommunicado for awhile. I’ve been very busy with several projects, all of which are due in the short-term and I can talk about after they’re done.

Let’s just give a few teasers:

1. It’s compact, re(a)d, and has a tail.
2. Where, oh where, has the local coffee shop gone?
3. Don’t be late!

I’m also busy with wedding planning and honeymoon arrangements. I will, of course, be tracking our excursions in the GeoPress demo blog, which also happens to be my current travelog. Of course, my friends & family also dragged me off for a weekend of fun in Boston (there was some work too). I highly recommend the

.

I talked a little while ago about the enlightening insight of understanding more about how the next phase of Applications will be “desktop-deployed web applications”. This was inspired/aided by listening to the brilliance of people like Matt Webb. Using standardized, hopefully cross-platform technologies, it’s possible to develop your application once, and “push” it to any number of devices.

Ajaxian discusses Adobe’s new “Apollo”:

Apollo is client-based software that will run Flash applications separately from a browser, whether online or offline

The image shows an example travel application developed in Flash, and deployed to a desktop via Apollo. (via Digital Backcountry)

I also saw that Chris Messina is helping out on a project WebKit on Rails, whose goal is to make it easier to deploy Apple’s WebKit and also to “come up with new ideas and practices that leverage the WebKit platform”. WebKit is an excellent platform to develop desktop web apps, as it can be baked straight into a Cocoa application, but be accessing a “web application” that may be running locally on the users’ machine.

rails-app-installer allows you to bundle and install/uninstall a Rails application, including required gems.

$ gem install my_app
$ my_app install /some/path


All the emerging standards for simple markup and syndication of location are Earth-centric (and sometimes just US/North American-centric). Granted, most people are probably only interested in locations that they can actually go to anytime soon.

However, with the increasing number of interplanetary rovers, observations of moons, and perhaps future excursions, it is still useful to define how to properly handle these other reference frames. Luna and Mars are two suggested Microformats that are starting the discussion on how one might mark locations on the two bodies. Additionally, the OGC is working now on determining standards for scientists and developers to publish and share data sources of planets, moons, asteroids, comets, ‘oh my’.

And why does the Earth have to be the only one with cool, “slippy maps”. I quickly put together a map of Mars. It uses the powerful OpenLayers Javascript mapping library to display the tiles from a NASA WMS server.

To produce the locations for the map, I put up a Space Blog, using WordPress and a slightly modified GeoPress to publish Mars lander locations and landing dates. I altered the published Microformats produced by GeoPress to make the class “geo mars” as a suggested way to markup Mars coordinates. The published GeoRSS feeds from the Space Blog then produce the locations and layers automatically on the OpenLayers Mars Map.

To Do: CRS and You

So this is all very neat, and in the end, really easy to setup. However, this is just a demonstration and in no way should be construed as “the way to do it”. Specifically, there are these questions left unanswered:

1. How to define the Microformat and GeoRSS for non-Earth (and non-WGS84) reference frames
2. How to define the Microformats and GeoRSS/Geonames location for non-Earth locations (like “Ares Vallis”)
3. More sources for interplanetary map servers
4. Ways to syndicate, and subscribe to, specific bodies
5. Support for publishing, consuming, and drawing lines - in order to plot out mission profiles
6. Support for publishing, consuming, and drawing areas - in order to plot out mission profiles, landing sites, and expected areas of “mission failures”

I’m sure there are more issues, so please speak up. You know who you space geeks are.