October 23, 2006
Geonames are in
We've managed to migrate to the data from www.geonames.org. With a lot of places and a, let's say, less-than-optimal data model for geo data, it took some effort to import the data and migrate the current content. Thanks to ground work of Robin of Sonologic, and some more ploughing through data by Tim here, we now have a completely new set of place names.
It also comes with some good lessons learned. My fear with the minimalistic approach of agile was grounded. Apart from the rules of "you ain't gonna need it" (YAGNI) and "don't repeat yourself" (DRY) we need to give more weight to DITWA: don't invent the wheel again. Looking at the database tables with Tim, I had the feeling "it's deja vu all over again"...
At the very least we will have to fix our data model to be completely compatible with Geonames. Saves a lot of hassle for updating. But better still is to make this the first real test for interfacing with other web services. Geonames already found out how to point people searching for "Moscow" to Russia rather than Moscow, Alabama in the US. And just become better in caching results rather than building the same functionality.
So... on with the show, Simon of 8Media has been working on several issues over the last weeks, and we'll be working with them for another few weeks to clean up more bugs and usability issues. Then it's about time to get that to the CoolThePlanet site. With the RSS feed from our subversion server in my Miranda IM contact list, it's nice to see the message icon blinking every day for new updates coming in.
Posted by rolf at 5:26 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 10, 2006
Moving to Geonames
We've been struggling with the geo data for a while, after compiling a database from various sources ourselves. A lot of work, very doable, yet usually beaten by other work on people's priority lists here. Over the last months, www.geonames.org seems to pick up more and more steam, and so we decided to move over and team up with the community maintaining that data. Tomorrow, we'll start migrating the current database content, and have a first go at staying up-to-date with the geonames.org changes.
There is some python code available to interface with the geonames web services, so that fuels my hopes we can also manage to link up in a more "web 2.0" way with the data services over there. It's about time we have some more mashing up than just our Google maps. If anyone is already working on a Django interface for this, I'd love to hear from you!
Posted by rolf at 12:49 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack