Live Earthquake Mashup needs new maintainer(s)
Jörn Clausen
The Live Earthquake Mashup at
http://www.oe-files.de/gmaps/eqmashup.html
is, I think, one of the oldest applications (in the wild and still
alive, at least) which uses Simile Timeline. It has been constantly
running since March 2007. And it's starting to get old and needs
someone to take care of it.
I know what you are thinking: Earthquake Mashup? BORING!! Probably.
After all, this is the classic "hello world" example in "How to write
Mashups in 20 Minutes". But over time, this mashup has achieved a nice
constant level of usage, that usually skyrockets in the wake of big
events (http://thebloeg.blogspot.com/2011/03/ooooh-that-ripped.html).
So I guess it actually covers some kind of demand. And I think
compared to its contenders, thanks to the Timeline widget, it looks
pretty cool...
But to provide this service for some more years, the mashup needs an
overhaul. Most urgent is probably a switch to current APIs, it still
uses Timeline 1.x and Google Maps API 2.x. And compatibility with
modern browsers (especially those in mobile devices) needs to be
checked and improved. And I have a few other ideas. But unfortunately
not the time, anymore...
I have set up a Google Project at
http://code.google.com/p/eqmashup/
and collected a few ideas in the Wiki. If you like to contribute to or
take over this project, please let me know, so we can discuss the
details.
Joern
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Joern Clausen
http://thebloeg.blogspot.com/
http://www.oe-files.de/oefiles/
David Karger
on exhibit instead of timeline. that prepackages a lot of the
functionality you had to implement (coordinating multiple views) plus
some other nice packaged stuff like faceted browsing. The biggest
obstacle is that your data feeds aren't really well structured---they
conflate various types of information under the same tag, or even as
concatenated text inside one field. But I quickly through together an
example, where I fiddled a little with the data, at
http://people.csail.mit.edu/karger/Exhibit/Quakes/quakes.html
Jörn Clausen
On Wed, May 25, 2011 at 8:34 PM, David Karger <kar...@mit.edu> wrote:
> If you're thinking of reimplementing, you might want to consider basing on
> exhibit instead of timeline. that prepackages a lot of the functionality
> you had to implement (coordinating multiple views) plus some other nice
> packaged stuff like faceted browsing.
First of all: I don't want to do the reimplementing, I simply don't
have the time :)
When I started the mashup, I think David Huynh already suggested using
Exhibit, and I probably did a quick test myself back then. Actually, I
think Exhibit has too many features for what I want to do. And the
most tweaking I had to do was diverting a click in the timeline to
open a bubble on the map. The fact that timeline and map have their on
pop-ups is my main problem with Exhibit. Had I been able to reproduce
this behaviour with Timeline 2.x, I probably would have continued the
mashup myself.
> The biggest obstacle is that your
> data feeds aren't really well structured---they conflate various types of
> information under the same tag, or even as concatenated text inside one
> field.
I think that problem is solvable. But even then, the data does not
have enough facets to make for a nice Exhibit. If the data was tagged
with geographical regions, types of earthquakes, level of destruction
on the ground, and so on, that would call for useful filters.
Filtering on the data that is there I don't consider that useful. Your
filter for the magnitude is a nice example of what Exhibit can achieve
technically, but I don't think anybody is interested in viewing all
earthquakes of magnitudes 3 to 5 and filter out all bigger events. At
least not for the current data feeds covering only the last two weeks.
For analyzing hundreds of thousands of events over several decades,
that might be a different story. When Exhibit 3.0 is ready, that could
be a nice application )
mleden
I haven't looked in-depth at your Timeline, but it might be worth
considering converting it to dipity. If you haven't seen it yet, take
a look at some of the examples at:
http://www.dipity.com/
This "Timeline SaaS" does much of the heavy lifting for you and seems,
at first glance, to provide most/all of the features that you
require. If you think it's a possibility, I might even be able to do
a first-pass at the conversion. Just let me know what you think.
-Mark
Jörn Clausen
Dipity looks really cool, and I guess creating a mashup with it would
be very easy. But I think the simultaneous display of the timeline and
the map and their synchronicity is one of the main aspects of my
mashup. I don't want to lose this feature.
But I am looking for someone to take over my mashup, so he or she is
may give it a try.
Joern
On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 4:12 PM, mleden <mle...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Hi Jorn,
>
> I haven't looked in-depth at your Timeline, but it might be worth
> considering converting it to dipity. If you haven't seen it yet, take
> a look at some of the examples at:
> http://www.dipity.com/
>
> This "Timeline SaaS" does much of the heavy lifting for you and seems,
> at first glance, to provide most/all of the features that you
> require. If you think it's a possibility, I might even be able to do
> a first-pass at the conversion. Just let me know what you think.
>
> -Mark
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