[wsfii-discuss] More on maps -was- Re: [Community] Worldwide Map of wireless communities ?

Wed May 3 21:40:19 UTC 2006

Hi michel, (and everybody)

Not so far from you, at guifi.net, we have recently developed a new map 
services for meet out growing requirements and scalability, 100% based 
on open source and free public resources (mapserver, public maps, etc). 
I'm pleased to use this reply to announce it here, and also post to the 
WSFII list (sorry).

You can see it live at http://maps.guifi.net

We've built it in a way that can be used worldwide, people just have to 
find our their local map sources and add them, i.e. if you drill down 
into catalonia, you'll get ortophoto details up to 5K resolution.. . 
data is feeded also in open xml formats (in our case, extracted from our 
drupal module application, you can see our database at 
http://guifi.net/guifi_zones ).

To give an example, here is my node:
http://maps.guifi.net/world.phtml?Pointer=Y&local_maps=Y&Supernodes=Y&NodesAP=Y&NodesClient=Y&NodesProjected=Y&LinksWDS=Y&LinksClient=Y&LinksOffline=Y&Lang=ca&ViewRegion=Veure+directament&minx=2.165619&miny=41.908991&maxx=2.301663&maxy=42.011024&imagewidth=600&imageheight=450&mainmap.x=323&mainmap.y=169&CMD=ZOOM_IN&KEYMAPXSIZE=120&KEYMAPYSIZE=90&kminx=0.127079&kminy=40.465125&kmaxx=3.371953&kmaxy=42.898781&MapSize=600%2C450&CMD=ZOOM_IN&PREVIOUS_MODE=1

We did in that way instead of Google maps because of several reasons. 
Mapserver is opensource, google currently does not provide this level of 
details in our rural areas, where our network is most developed, google 
javascripts may suck on zones with hundreds of nodes like ours, and 
requires an agreement where they talk about some undefined "reserved 
rights". Not to mention that Google is somewhat involved in that 
"mouvement".

100% agree on you pints. IMHO I do think that worldwide free network 
infrastructures lacks of a global view (or I'm not aware of it, sorry if 
I do miss something relevant). Many other databases you just don't know 
about what really they are about...

To allow interoperability between every community way of 
storing/managing their network information, and still be able to 
aggregate information, we are developing what we call "nodexchange" 
format. This map application already implements some of the nodexchange 
features.

We have those maps available to everybody on a svn, and at guifi.net 
we'll be very happy to help in porting this to other sites, or include 
more local maps resources from other countries or regions (currently 
only Catalonia, Spain and US)...

We just ask to any potential adopter to be a truly communtity style free 
network, we are using our version of the Wireless Commons, but anything 
similar like picopeer agreements etc will be ok,  we just want to avoid 
to get listed by some speculative "mouvements" which we do still don't 
know what they really build and in which terms. I'm sure that everybody 
understands.

Cheers to everybody,
Ramon Roca.

En/na michel memeteau ha escrit:

>Hi , I'm new to this list but it's been few months I discovered freenetworks.org
>and I hope it's gonna become a wordwide movement taking over commercial pseudo
>"mouvement " ( do you see who I'm talking about ?) 
>
>
>I wanted to know if there is already a map for finding Worldwide communities 
>
>We started one with france 
>
>http://carte.wireless-fr.org/
>
>And right now the datas are in a XML file 
>
>
>http://carte.wireless-fr.org/assoce_status.xml
>
>But this could be in a SQL Database .... 
>
>
>I always thought freenetworks.org was the place for this kind of map, even
>another map with worldwide internet-providing  active access points ( using
>Wifidog for example ) would show people we don't need commercial mouvement ...
>
>
>
>Let me know what you think about mapping and if this has already been done ...
>
>cheers 
>
>  
>