[okfn-help] Geographical and temporal information in Open Correspondence

Wed Oct 27 21:40:26 BST 2010

Dear all,

I've been working on the Open Correspondence site in terms of porting 
the original idea and now trying to do the bug fixes.

The site has 918 letters in it which we are exposing in JSON, XML (very, 
very basic), and RDF with a really basic endpoint and a nearly installed 
Xapian search engine. So the text, I feel, is catered for and I'm sure 
that the various things that we're working on will expose faults or show 
other sorts of information that I haven't thought of yet.

One of the things that I wanted to look at in Open Correspondence is the 
spatial and temporal information that exists in the letters. I've only 
had a brief look at the letters but I've sort of been aware of the
temporal bits of information like the dates that the letters were 
written and the possibilities of using Simile to provide varying types 
of indexes and timelines. Perhaps there's a better way of doing it...

However there is also a fair amount of 'spatial' information not only in 
the letterheads but also in places mentioned in the text and his 
travels. I was having a quick scan of the letters to Wilkie Collins[1]
and Dickens wrote from the US, France, Kent and London over the 16 year 
correspondence. I suspect that there is a more interesting query in, for 
example, following one of this American tours and who he wrote to from 
where.

I had thought of trying to use Google maps to show the data for Collins 
but I'm sure that there is a better way of doing it. I certainly cannot 
remember thinking or visualising data this way when I was doing my 
degree (though letters were a curiously ignored format through the course).

The RDF endpoint does not expose the geographical data yet as I'm not 
sure of the best / most useful ontology to use though browsing there is 
some W3C work and opengeospatial has various  vocabularies / ontologies 
that could be used.  I think that there is some great stuff that could 
be done with it and some interesting software built with it that goes 
beyond simple geocoding (as outlined above re: Google maps).

It is not an area that I have much experience in yet (but it does seem 
that both MySQL and Postgresql support GIS to some degree though again 
better tools may exist) but any advice, pointers and so on gratefully
received.

All best,

Iain

blog: austgate.co.uk
skype: iainemsley
mob: 07723 992492

1 
http://www.opencorrespondence.org/letters/view/dickens/Mr%20W%20Wilkie%20Collins