[pmwiki-users] Geotagging for PmWiki

stevecrisp at gmail.com stevecrisp at gmail.com
Mon Oct 19 10:46:29 CDT 2009


Dear Pm community,

As per title I'm attempting to write a proof of concept PmWiki recipe for
geotagging support in PmWiki.  I could do with some design advice on my
embryonic ideas/ramblings below:

(1) We want to add geotag to relevant wiki pages.  New markup needed (:coord
<lat>, <lng>:) e.g. (:coord 52.12345, -1.23456789:).  This would create
metatags in the resultant html output in keeping with say Wikipedia's ideas
here:

+ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geotagging
+
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Geographical_coordinates

So we have geotagged page we need to get to the data (from other
applications) in various ways; GeoRSS feed, backend database

(2) For the GeoRSS feed I'm hoping I'll simply reuse one of the existing RSS
feeds and convert the output to GeoRSS XML output.  Hopefull I'll be able to
get this working for Recent Changes for example.  GeoRSS is good as many
mapping clients consume this.  I could also adapt for output of KML also
lets not jump before I'm walking!

(3) The end goal for the database backend is we could use PmWiki to display
relevant content to a specified grid reference, and a few quick geodetic
calculations could give me a list of pages with content near to a specific
coordinate.  This is a bit like Flikr for photos.  I'll start with the
SQLite receipe (http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/SQLite) as I've used
this before with PmWiki.  I could add two new columns to the 'pages' table
which will extract the latitude and longitude data from my new markup as per
(1) above.  This will help me perform quick distance calculations at a later
time without inspecting the page content.  Ideally I'd use either Postgres
(PostGIS extensions) or MySQL backend (with geo extensions).

For those that are still reading, I've the following initial questions:

(a) has this been done before?
(b) if not, does the above sound achievable (assuming a few pointers from
this community as I uncover issues)?
(c) I assume I'll copy the (:summary:) markup item to create new new
(:coord:) markup.  Is this good practise?
(d) Will a customer RSS feed (read GeoRSS feed) be possible from the content
of data available from the recent changes RSS feed?  I'll need page title
and coord markup within the XML output.
(e) For the database backend, starting with SQLite recipe, can I simply add
two columns (lat & lng) and have the new (:coord:) markup be parsed by it?

Any advice very much welcome.
--Steve.
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