Last week, Sean Gillies, the lead developer for the Pleiades project at University of North Caroline blogged about his experimentation with an application he is building called Mush. He’s taken 2 georss feeds and has combined them using a PULL method to determine the sphere of influence. He writes more about this at Import Cartography and specifically uses information drawn from the Celtic Coin Index to represent his example. Fantastic and just what I wanted people to start doing with the data that I’ve bent.
As Tom Elliot put it very eloquently in his email to the Pleiades project mailing list:
Sean’s demo application takes
(1) an XML webfeed (a query result, in fact) from http://www.planningalerts.com (a site that searches “as many local authority planning websites as it can find” in the UK and provides details of development applications in user-specified locales)
and (2) a separate XML webfeed from the Oxford Celtic Coin Index (via the Portable Antiquities Scheme; kudos to Dan for implementing that feed as part of the coin index’s API!)
It then parses each for georss tags (i.e., encoded spatial information), then puts 1km radius buffers around each encoded point and then looks for intersections between any of those circles. The resulting intersections are provided as another, new feed, which can also be pumped directly into an online mapping tool (in this example, Sean runs it through google maps).
Result: a visualization (or shareable information) about development applications affecting areas where Celtic coins are known to have been found.
The method, of course, is extensible to almost any combination of feeds that have geo information in them.
Imagine what could do automatically and on-the-fly with similar calculations on 1km bubbles around pleiades places and similar bubbles
around:* epigraphic findspots GPS-gathered by the Inscriptions of Roman Cyrenaica Project
* footprint records for archaeology survey projects and datasets cataloged by CGMA/MAGIS or archived/served by ADS or OpenContext
I thought that Sean’s work needed more publication over here. Good work that man. There will be loads more to come from him without a doubt.