It would be great to hear from people about how they are using the Unlock place search services. So you’re encouraged to contact us and tell us how you’re making use of Unlock and what you want out of the service.
Here are some of the projects and services we’ve heard about that are making interesting use of Unlock in research applications.
The Molly project based at University of Oxford provides an open source mobile location portal service designed for campuses. Molly uses some Cloudmade services and employs Unlock for postcode searching.
Georeferencer.org uses Unlock Places to search old maps. The service is used by National Library of Scotland Map Library and other national libraries in Europe.
More on the use of Unlock Places by georeferencer.org.
CASOS at CMU has been experimenting the Unlock Text service to geolocate social network information.
The Open Fieldwork project has been georeferencing educational resources: “In exploring how we could dynamically position links to fieldwork OER on a map, based on the location where the fieldwork takes place, one approach might be to resolve a position from the resource description or text in the resource. The OF project tried out the EDINA Unlock service – it looks like it could be very useful.”
We had several interesting entries to 2010′s dev8d developer challenge using Unlock:
Embedded GIS-lite Reporting Widget:
Duncan Davidson, Informatics Ventures, University of Edinburgh
“Adding data tables to content management systems and spreadsheet software packages is a fairly simple process, but statistics are easier to understand when the data is visual. Our widget takes geographic data – in this instance data on Scottish councils – passes it through EDINA’s API and then produces coordinates which are mapped onto Google. The end result is an annotated map which makes the data easier to access.”
Geoprints, which also works with the Yahoo Placemaker API, by
Marcus Ramsden at Southampton University.
“Geoprints is a plugin for EPrints. You can upload a pdf, Word document or Powerpoint file, and it will extract the plain text and send it to the EDINA API. GeoPrints uses the API will pull out the locations from that data and send it to the database. Those locations will then be plotted onto a map, which is a better interface for exploring documents.”
Point data in mashups: moving away from pushpins in maps:
Aidan Slingsby, City University London
“Displaying point data as density estimation services, chi surfaces and ‘tagmaps’. Using British placenames classified by generic form and linguistic origin, accessed through the Unlock Places API.”
The dev8d programme for 2011 is being finalised at the moment and should be published soon; the event this year runs over two days, and should definitely be worth attending for developers working in, or near, education and research.