ShortCoords

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Contents

[edit] ShortCoords

[edit] Owner

RHOK Birmingham Team.

Proposed by: RHOK Birmingham Team.

Contact: Pete Smith @ptchaw & Seb Kinne @sebkinne

[edit] Summary

Accurate geographic locations are expressed using Longitude and Latitude. These numbers are not easy to remember. The Georef is shorter but also not memorable. This service will provide the ability to assign useful names to geographic locations, which can then be consumed by other services. In essence this is like tinyurl for geographic locations.

[edit] Example

Someone would like to tell someone else where they are. Instead of providing full Longitude & Latitude they can provide a ShortCoord.

[edit] Video

None yet

[edit] Use Case/User Story/Scenario

[edit] User story 1: Define Short Location

Seb arrives at a location and wants to define where he is so that other people can usefully know his location. He determines his Latitude and Longitude using GPS or even a paper map. He then enters this information into the ShortCoords system along with his preferred name. He can then tell other people where he is using this ShortCoord. This information can also be used by other systems instead of the Latitude and Longitude.

[edit] User story 2: Update Location

Pete changes where he is camped but does not want to have to update other systems to provide his new location. All he has to do is update ShortCoords to replace the Latitude and Longitude for PeteCampSite to the new location. All the other systems now know Pete's new location.

[edit] Description and Constraints

TO DO

[edit] Extra Credit

TO DO

[edit] Similar projects and Resources

  • Geohash allows you to type in a place name and associate it with a hashed URL (the URL can be shortened, in which case the associated coordinates become less exact). The hashed URLs are not human readable. The user can associate a name with the hash by appending the name after a colon in the given URL. For example, this is a named hash for B7, Birmingham, UK: http://geohash.org/gcqdts3dj4p03:B7_Birmingham Geohash does integrate with other services such as Google Maps, OpenStreetMap and Geocaching.com by giving each location a link to its analogue on those sites.


[edit] Coordinate systems

  • Colorado Uni has an overview of various coordinate systems
  • KML is used by Google Earth. It is an XML language, and so not human readable.

[edit] Check-in services

  • Systems like 4sq, Facebook Places or Gowalla allow users to "check in" to a human-readable location, but that location data cannot be used by other apps, except via the 4sq API

[edit] What next and Sustainability

TO DO

[edit] Current State and Solutions

Currently working on this proposal @ RHoK 2.0 Birmingham

Retrieved from "http://wiki.rhok.org/ShortCoords"
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