We're not the only ones who love maps: Nestoria Interview with Julian Doherty
To justify the time I spent trawling over the MashupAustralia competition website I got in touch with one of the map mashers, Julian Doherty who is also a senior software developer at Lonely Planet. At LP Julian is part of the community product team, who are responsible for developing all the social user interaction features, like discussions, groups and multi-user gadgets.
Julian also adds: I'm a geek through and through, I love playing around with technology and software development. In my spare time I play a lot of video games, and run a few websites about them (ubercharged and ihatevans are a couple).
Let's start with the map mashup competition, can you talk to us about the map you produced at the govhack event and how you settled on the idea?
The mashup we produced is called "it's buggered mate". It's a simple mashup that allows users to pinpoint maintenance tasks that their local council needs to attend to by picking a location on a map, drawing details, and annotating with text and icons. The app itself is pretty basic. It's got simple data entry and uses Google maps with some extra layers that Ken Hoetmer (another Lonely Planet person) wrote to allow drawing and annotation on the map.It's gotten a bit of media attention in the press releases etc - I think mainly because of the name. We intentionally made it a bit cheeky and very "Australian" so it would seem familiar and make users more comfortable. Which is ironic, because the LP team we had at govhack consisted of me (a New Zealander), a Canadian, and a Welshman :P
- Screenshot of it's buggered mate
We settled on the concept because we couldn't think of anything better. The data feeds available at govhack weren't actually all that inspiring, and a lot were at an aggregate level without any geocoded information, so they didn't lend themselves to creating deep mashups with lots of user generated content. In the end we built that one because it *doesn't* actually read any data from any government sources, but rather allows data to be collected and fed *into* government rather than out of it to the public.
Later we integrated council lookup using geo2gov.com.au (another govhack project) to figure out which council was actually responsible for the area that users have identified (but I think they're changed their site, and the lookup isn't working right now, I'll have to fix that)
One of the aims of the competition was to promote open access to geospatial data - how much of an issue is access to data for people wanting to play around with maps?
Access to data was an issue. A lot of it is aggregated, and not presented in a format that is readily usable by 3rd parties (Excel spreadsheets, proprietary formats etc). And most of it doesn't contain a lot of geocoded information, so it makes it hard to cross reference it against your own data. There are a lot of government information sources that *are* available, but only via a web form that has to be used from a browser - which makes it difficult to consume from a mashup without resorting to screen scraping, which is a pain. Ideally, all these data feeds would be accessible via a simple web service API that other 3rd party applications can talk to automatically to pull down data to mash up.
That isn't because things are secret, or restricted, more that they just weren't designed to be used that way. Hopefully awareness gets raised through events like govhack, and data will become more available. Even in the last couple of months a lot of data sources have opened up.
What are some of the most interesting uses for this kind of geospatial data have you come across? From both the practical to the weird and wonderful.
Some of the coolest ones I thought were the ones that layered a heap of data sources together to give you an interactive picture of what different areas are like. e.g Suburb Matchmaker , Know Where You Live, Suburban Trends and Lobby Lens which did a similar thing combining government lobbying data. There were a few "find the nearest toilet" apps that seemed to be crowd favourites as well :P
What kind of interesting implementations can you imagine on the horizon? (Even if it's the far off horizon)
Big trends in internet development are real time, geo, mobile, and user generated content. These all relate to each other, and make 2-way communication between users and data easier and more useful. Getting real time updates on events happening around you, and providing feedback will be very cool. I think the user interfaces of mobile devices needs some time to develop, at least for the type of mashup we did, it's a pain to click through text fields to enter details on a mobile device. Having intelligent devices that can figure out what's going on around you and automatically send through that data for you would make these type of apps really useful.
e.g. for its-buggered-mate, it would be great to just point your mobile phone at a pot hole in the road, or a broken playground, take a picture, then have the phone figure out what you want to do - in this case report the problem along with the location and maybe some context information about it without any other user interaction.
You recently held a HackDay at LP Melbourne, can you talk about why you hosted the event and what kind of interesting ideas came out of it?
The LP hack day was to promote the LP places-of-interest API that we've recently opened up for public use. and also to join forces with govhack to host a Melbourne event following the Canberra event the weekend before.
In addition to promoting the API, it was also to test it out in the real world, and see what else needs to be added to it to make it useful.
The LP API exposes places of interest (POIs) collected as part of the travel guide production process (hotels, restaurants, sights etc) tagged with geo info. 3rd party applications can find POIs based on a place name, destination, or by specifying a lat/long bounding box.
Google developed a Wave application "Trippy" with us as part of the Google wave launch a few months back using this API.
There were a lot of cool apps that came out on the day. The winner was one that generated a road trip from a starting point to random interesting destinations in the area: A user enters a starting point (e.g. "Melbourne"), and a distance they want to travel, the app then goes and pulls down POIs from LP in the area, and plots the road trip with directions onto a Google map. Very cool - Although it uses the API in ways we hadn't anticipated and stresses it quite a lot. We had to bump the throttling limit WAY up to even let it work. Which is good, that's the kind of feedback we wanted to get, and it helps ongoing development going forward.
I've got the impression that the geospatial and mapping community in Australia is a pretty interesting place to be, can you give me an idea about current thoughts and trends in the field at the moment - what are people whispering about, what are people complaining about and what are people trying to crack - that sort of thing.
Yeah, there's a lot of interesting stuff happening. To be honest, I'm only closely familiar with what's happening at LP - although I think Google Maps was developed in Sydney, and there's some very cool stuff happening there.
Part of what we're working on is trying to link existing content more closely with geo data. We've got a heap of content on destinations that is generated by forum posts from users etc, but a lot of it has either no geo data, or only very coarse grained data based on country or maybe city, which can make it hard to link together. We're trying to figure out ways of grouping together by automatically tagging it based on general themes and location. Hopefully so we can better and present it in a way that it can be easily cross referenced by different parts of our site.
Is there anything else you'd like to add that I haven't quizzed you on yet?
Probably, but I can't think of anything off the top of my head :)
Thanks very much for your time Julian.
No probs
