Alex Little

This morning I gave a seminar in KMi about how we developed the MSG Presence Maps, the seminar was webcast and you can view a replay

I hope to also put up a link to the ‘raw’ powerpoint presentation.

I’ve created short demonstration video of the features in MSG Presence Maps – you can view the YouTube version below, or for a higher quality version please visit http://kmi.open.ac.uk/projects/osc/screencasts/msg-maps-demo/

Now that I’ve fixed the problem with the rounding and precision of users lat/lng coordinates, I’ve been able to get back to what I was actually trying to do, and that is allow users to select which groups of contacts are shown on the map. By default when you visit the map all your contacts (who we have location data for) will be shown on the map, there is then an option to tick/untick each group of contacts and the map is dynamically updated with these changes.

I feel like we’re getting very close to having the maps deployed onto a a ‘useable’ server – rather than just running on my desktop machine!

Over the last few days we’ve also been running a few presentations and workshops about the LabSpace tools, for the Widening Participation Fair (held at the OU on Tuesday) and hosting a vist from the Sussex Learning Network (SLN) – as we’re heading down to sunny Sussex to do a few workshops for them later this month and again in May. All the feedback we’ve had from the workshops has been very positive and people seem keen to find out more and test out the tools we’ve developed.

I also gave a quick demo yesterday of MSG at the mLearn  (Mobile Learner Support Project)

Spent the morning having a play around with Google maps as we’re looking to embed maps into the MSG – I’ve got a simple page set up (here) to demo listing contacts – you can then click on the contact to show their location on the map.

However, what we’d really like would be to have would be all contacts shown on the same map (my current example just show one contact at a time). I had a go at doing this with the Google maps API, but all UK addresses seemed to draw a blank – then I found out about the issue of having the lat/long coordinates for UK addresses (some copyright thing! – see all the messages in this forum about it). So it seems (from my current understanding after my brief delve into this stuff this morning) that I’d need to get hold of a geocode database to use with Google maps. Apparently the OU might already have a geocode db I can use – so I’ll need to see if I can track this down and get permission to make use of it.

There are plenty of other options for us I guess including…

• use another mapping service which does provide UK geocodes
• use IP lookup – I know this wouldn’t be too accurate for lots of people – but could make a best guess & give users the option to update if they want
• integrate in a postcode/geocode db – there are apparently free ones, that only have the first part of the postcode – but that’s actually all we want for this application!

Anyway, I shall keep going and see if I can get any further