Geopipe with icon

[Don Park]

The android geomena app, Geopipe, now shows a cute little geomena icon
on the statubar when its running. I just committed the change. Perhaps
the .apk should be hosted somewhere. Felix - is it in the market? a
market search turns up zero. If not, maybe geomena.org can host the
apk.

Don

[Felix Nensa]

Hi,

> The android geomena app, Geopipe, now shows a cute little geomena icon
> on the statubar when its running. I just committed the change.

that's great news. Just tested it and it works flawlessly.

> Perhaps the .apk should be hosted somewhere. Felix - is it in the market? a
> market search turns up zero. If not, maybe geomena.org can host the
> apk.

It is not in the market yet. I thought of waiting with that until it
its a bit more "complete" and has a license attached (btw. which one
would be appropriate?).
But I think its a great idea to put it on geomena.org for download.

Regarding point 3 on the roadmap (thanks Don for putting it here
http://wiki.github.com/luckfamousa/GeoPipe/roadmap). Are there any api
proposals or even specs on how additional parameters like
signal-strength or encryption should look like?

Best,

Felix

[Don Park]

On Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 1:38 PM, Felix Nensa <felix...@gmail.com> wrote:
> It is not in the market yet. I thought of waiting with that until it
> its a bit more "complete" and has a license attached (btw. which one
> would be appropriate?).
> But I think its a great idea to put it on geomena.org for download.

Good idea on waiting before putting it out into the market.
The APK for those reading this email is available at
http://geomena.org/clients/geopipe-2010-04-28.apk

> Regarding point 3 on the roadmap (thanks Don for putting it here
> http://wiki.github.com/luckfamousa/GeoPipe/roadmap). Are there any api
> proposals or even specs on how additional parameters like
> signal-strength or encryption should look like?

The current POST destination is for an HTML form. It is a key/value
pair with no hierarchy - ?a=b&c=d. I'm thinking the 'real' API is a
post with a json blob at the payload.

POST http://api.geomena.org/v1/observations
post body is json:
{
"latitude":"45.5554251645006",
"mac":"00:1b:63:2c:bc:4d",
"longitude":"-122.62548923492432"
}

like the twitter 'user annotations' what ever data is posted under
5kbytes or so gets stored into the document database. so maybe a full
payload would look more complex like
{
"latitude":"45.5554251645006",
"mac":"00:1b:63:2c:bc:4d",
"longitude":"-122.62548923492432"
"rssi": "-80"
"encryption": "open"
"x-geopipe": { authentication: "oauth",
username: "bob",
version: "24-Apr-2010" }
}

and the result is a json status blob (inspired by couchdb)
{ "status":"OK" }

[Felix Nensa]

> Good idea on waiting before putting it out into the market.
> The APK for those reading this email is available at
> http://geomena.org/clients/geopipe-2010-04-28.apk

It seems the clients page got lost http://geomena.org/clients/ now :)

> The current POST destination is for an HTML form. It is a key/value
> pair with no hierarchy - ?a=b&c=d. I'm thinking the 'real' API is a
> post with a json blob at the payload.

Yes, that makes sense.

> like the twitter 'user annotations' what ever data is posted under
> 5kbytes or so gets stored into the document database. so maybe a full
> payload would look more complex like
> {
> "latitude":"45.5554251645006",
> "mac":"00:1b:63:2c:bc:4d",
> "longitude":"-122.62548923492432"
> "rssi": "-80"
> "encryption": "open"
> "x-geopipe": { authentication: "oauth",
>                    username: "bob",
>                    version: "24-Apr-2010" }
> }

Ok, that is very flexible. But it means that we should define some
schema that all clients agree on. I am working a lot with XML Schema
which is powerful but complex. Perhaps we should go with
http://json-schema.org ? (never used that before, anyone?)

I think we should also consider storing an agent/client identifier and
the type of the location provider (gps, cell-id, etc.) to increase
location averaging accuracy.

Best,

Felix

[Don Park]

On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 3:53 PM, Felix Nensa <felix...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Good idea on waiting before putting it out into the market.
>> The APK for those reading this email is available at
>> http://geomena.org/clients/geopipe-2010-04-28.apk
>
> It seems the clients page got lost http://geomena.org/clients/ now :)

oh my! Thanks for the tip! I moved the android client to
http://geomena.org/downloads/geopipe-2010-04-28.apk

After moving the file I realized clients/ probably never worked as the
sinatra app wants a url of clients (with no trailing slash).

>> like the twitter 'user annotations' what ever data is posted under

> Ok, that is very flexible. But it means that we should define some
> schema that all clients agree on. I am working a lot with XML Schema

Yes, basic fields should be defined that can be counted on.

> http://json-schema.org ? (never used that before, anyone?)

Thats interesting. It would help for introspection of the service,
though I doubt it would get used.

> I think we should also consider storing an agent/client identifier and
> the type of the location provider (gps, cell-id, etc.) to increase
> location averaging accuracy.

Yes, a username or similar will be important. An agent ID to show what
app was used to collect the data would be useful too. I want to add
OAUTH2 to the API so that users who want to identify their uploads
have to authenticate in some way, just so that someone else cannot
start using the same identifier.

Don

[Felix Nensa]

>>> like the twitter 'user annotations' what ever data is posted under
>> Ok, that is very flexible. But it means that we should define some
>> schema that all clients agree on. I am working a lot with XML Schema
>
> Yes, basic fields should be defined that can be counted on.
>
>> http://json-schema.org ? (never used that before, anyone?)
>
> Thats interesting. It would help for introspection of the service,
> though I doubt it would get used.

Examples and descriptive text are definitely more pragmatic.
But if we have json examples we can get the schema for free :)

http://zaach.github.com/orderly.js/

>> I think we should also consider storing an agent/client identifier and
>> the type of the location provider (gps, cell-id, etc.) to increase
>> location averaging accuracy.
>
> Yes, a username or similar will be important. An agent ID to show what
> app was used to collect the data would be useful too. I want to add
> OAUTH2 to the API  so that users who want to identify their uploads
> have to authenticate in some way, just so that someone else cannot
> start using the same identifier.

Yes, sounds good.