Geolinked Institutional Web Sites

Northumbria - providing interface between Google maps and CMS. How to get there facility for open days and casual visitors.

Unfortunately the Wolverhampton UK FE/HE map has not been updated since the creator's retirement. Northumbria have now created a moern version.

Geography students mashing photos of walks with their routes.

Maps to show "where is it" information by title with the point "lighting up" in development.

Flat finder for students in development.

Issues with Google constanly changing the API.

Salford - Work on Maps and Earth since 2005 then on ice now back in full-swing! Needed to acquire geo-data and find integration method. Used Google Earth to "author" - find the points and centre the map. Need to maintain KML file. Accessibility to Google maps can be achieved to some degree (see URL).

geourl.org - find co-ordinates - submit site. A bit geeky, but a good repository.
Transformers - RSS - KML - XSLT - for Earth and Maps as end-user presentation.

Firefox extension to show if geo-data meta is present in a page - see URL.

Flickr geoinformation for non-geeks - data from cameras / phones etc. Add Google and can then mashup with campus maps etc.

Microformats keep infomation in straight html via <div> tags. Firefox 3 to support these natively. Then can extend XML to pull data together.

Storage is an issues - storing the data - is it maintainable - does it help the end-users?

Oxford - Is there a point? Far too much geodata around. A great deal of amateur un-trusted information. So - do we replace our campus maps? Can we do something new? Embedded video and tours - replacements for the textural portal - another way of getting into the College Web sites.

Using map to map onto VLE and vice-versa - quite neat.

Use of embedded links and microformat expanding in and out of maps. Geotagging event locations.

So do we mash or pre-mash? Take control of "everything"? Or clean up our data so that the machines can read it properly?

Oxford go for the "organic" approach (URL) but how do you acquire the data. Have to be careful - who owns the data - have to be careful - GPS can be unreliable and unstable. So wrote an application to extract the data from Google.

It's fun and easy - KML is easy to do - users need education to make sense of microformats - legallity can be a problem - consider adding to the body of open data.

What's the institutional approach? How owns the building locations for example? The "geeky coolness" is evident - the challenge is to sell it to institutions. Arguable though that students will find "stuff" better themselves. Someone has to store the data though.