Category Archives: Geograph

Anything to do with the Geograph British Isles website

Flood images on Geograph

Some awesome images popping up on geograph covering the floods (for example, see thread, registration required). A particular sequence taken by Jonathan Billinger shows how swiftly things can change for the worse…

5:12pm 20th July 2007, 5:12pm – Evesham Waterside hotel. The river Avon is over the road…
6:28pm 20th July 2007, 6:28pm – a little over an hour later, and the road is flooded but a brave driver might just make it!.
8:03pm 20th July 2007, 8:03pm – after 3 hours though, the road is impassable and the hotel is starting to flood. How bad can it get you wonder?
5:51am 21st July 2007, 5:51am – you wake up early the next morning and this sight greets you! The water is still rising too…
1:51pm 21st July 2007, 1:51pm – less than 24 hours have passed and the water level peaks.
7:04am 22nd July 2007, 7:04am – the next morning, and the waters are starting to recede.

There’s always an inescapable voyeurism with natural disasters like this, and while I feel for those affected by the floods, you can’t help but see images like this and say “wow!”

The Geograph Warm Glow – Now Red Hot!

Geograph’s Geodetic Rock Star Barry Hunter attended the State of the Map conference at the weekend, and noticed something interesting in Ed Parson’s presentation…

That is a map of worldwide KML and GeoRSS feeds indexed by Google. But look, the British Isles are on fire! Could this be Geograph’s infamous warm glow at work?

Pictured right is Geograph’s current coverage map (click for an impressive 1km per pixel version). Each red dot is a 1km grid square where we have at least one photograph.

It certainly looks like there is some correlation between those maps, and shows that our 500,000+ web pages are being well indexed by Google.

Onwards and upwards!

Yahoo ZoneTag

Now that I’ve got pastebin back on an even keel, there’s lots of Geograph work to be done. I’ve been slowly working on a tagging engine which is nearing completion, but this morning Barry Hunter pointed me in the direction of Yahoo’s ZoneTag project (via HighEarthOrbit)

ZoneTag can suggest your location and tagging information based on cellphone tower, zipcode or latitude & longitude. The last piece of the tagging system I’m working on is the suggestion engine, so this was of great interest.

I gave it a quick test run, and predictably, it’s a case of feast or famine. A request for my home town of Baldock in the UK produces two results – “Plinston Hall” and “Letchworth” – so not entirely useful. More fruitful was a request for the location of the London Eye – you’re deluged with a plethora of data – here are the “venue” tags it suggests:

Waterloo, cleopatra’s needle, Eurostar, Downing Street, Eagle, London Eye, Guard, Waterloo Station, Parliament, Somerset House, Whitehall, Westminster, Memorial, skyline, Big Ben, Embankment, Thames, graffiti, Hungerford Bridge, Dali, SW1, horse, Eye, Banksy, train, Trafalgar Square, National Theatre, St Martins Lane, trains, station, Ferris Wheel, bridge, river, Guards, church, SE1, pub, Waterloo Bridge, Protest, IMAX, Horse Guards Parade, Wheel, River Thames, Charing Cross, Underground, View, sign, Southwark, House, Tube, Palace of Westminster, Horse Guards, Red, night, London Aquarium, Victoria Tower, england, sky, UK, Lion, long exposure, blue, statue, Trafalgar, Lambeth, Millenium Wheel, Demonstration, Peace, Anti War, Bus, Elephant, Europe, Clock, Nelsons Column, Street, Oxo Tower, Guess Where London

Perhaps a few too many there, but still, not a bad result. As it’s an experimental beta, not sure we can use it directly for Geograph, but it might serve as a useful comparison for our own suggestion engine. We could even offer a compatible service based on our own data too…