A 3 Step Guide to Enable Location for Your Business

How do you take advantage of the Location craze?

Here are 3 steps:

1. http://mapicurious.blogspot.com/2008/10/step-1-prepare-your-locations-listing.html
2. http://mapicurious.blogspot.com/2008/10/step-2-add-your-lat-lng-to-your.html
3. http://mapicurious.blogspot.com/2008/10/step-3-make-your-business-show-in.html

Thanks,

Maps

Mapicurious view on APIs

Over the years, we have spent a lot of development time integrating selected APIs into Mapicurious. Because APIs tend to change over time, we spend even more time updating our code. Sometimes writing code specifically to integrate with others' APIs is just a waste of time.

Do you feel the same?

We believe integration of Mapicurious into your software projects should be easier, therefore we offer the following as "our API":

- Each map has a GPX file - Access an example map: http://www.mapicurious.com/maps/483/locations.gpx

- Each map has a KML file - Access an example map: http://www.mapicurious.com/maps/483/locations.kml

- Each map has a GeoRSS file - Access an example map: http://www.mapicurious.com/maps/483/locations.rss

Our API philosophy is simple:

If you already have a geo based application you can probably read one or all of those formats, and read the useful data.

One more thing - We ask that you respect the attribution of data from Mapicurious by recognizing the author's name and Mapicurious.com with a link provided back to the author's map.

Thanks,

Maps

Great Christmas Lights Map - Start the Season off right!

We are excited to see the 2008 Bay Area CA Christmas Lights map on Mapicurious.com. Great details and shots for each one of these electric tributes. Thanks to user Regenegade for creating this map.

You have to check it out:

2008 Bay Area CA Christmas Lights

This information will be searchable on the mobile and Dash Mapicuriosities applications later today.

If you have a map idea, it is easy to register and create Christmas lights maps or any other map - and download them to your GPS.

Thanks,

Maps

GeoRel - Could we make this a new standard?

Has anyone ever thought to re-purpose the rel attribute in HTML and RSS to contain Geo data?

On face value, rel = relationship and placing lat lng inside the rel attribute relates the content spatially.

Now browsers and RSS readers can simply show links based on their distance order from the reader. Using this with a location service (FireEagle, etc), the browser/reader could assess relevance and relationship geographically.

The main advantages are easy and lightweight representation of geospatial relationships in the semantic web. Should be both machine and human readable.

It could support existing formats - Simple GeoRSS, Latitude and Longitude, KML (provide link to KML file)

Here are some link examples below based on Mapicurious data. Look at properties for each link to see the "rel" tag in use.

1. Basic Lat Lng (lat lng separated by space and pairs by comma for paths and polygons)

California Football Players 2006
Chick-Fil-A in Southern California
Hof's Hut - Southern California Tradition

2. L:

California Football Players 2006
Hof's Hut - Southern California Tradition

3. Geohash

California Football Players 2006
Chick-Fil-A in Southern California
Hof's Hut - Southern California Tradition

4. Georeference:

California Football Players 2006
Chick-Fil-A in Southern California
Hof's Hut - Southern California Tradition



Simple Use Cases:

Mapping web site - Overlay links directly on a map based on GeoRel data. Show geographically relevant links to map content to user, based on user's location (including distance calculations).

News site - Arrange links based on geospatial relevance.

RSS Reader - Filter links to content based on location from reader.