Day 2 of the European Open Source Convention 2006

Posted on September 19, 2006

These are the notes I’ve taken during the talks on the second day of the 2006 edition of the O’Reilly European Open Source Convention (better known as EuroOSCON 2006).

You can get to the index page for my notes on this conference here.

Microformats: Web of Data

Speaker: Brian Suda

(missed some of the initial content, must link to slides which are on-line on the speaker’s website)

  • Microformats are “people first, machines, second”
  • Embedded in HTML “overloading” the tags that are already there

Compound Microformats

  • hCard: Information on people
  • hCalendar: Information about events (calendaring)
  • hAtom: Information about feeds
  • hReview: Reviewing events, etc…
  • hResume: Your resume

Why encode things in HTML directly?

(Ex: hAtom) If it is in HTML it is easier to later convert it to other things, the semantics are all in HTML, human-readable, and then a “semantic cook” comes in and transforms it into whatever you want

Provides “Unix piping for the Web”:

  • HTML WebService
  • HTML Tidy Proxy Service Mapping
  • HTML …

Basically allows us to maintain everything (people, calendars, …) in a single format –HTML– by “overloading” the HTML markup elements such as span, class, …

Project honsting on Google Code

Speaker: Greg Stein

Google Code

  • Up now:
    • Simple interface, no advertising
    • Gmail-like issue tracking
    • Scalable Subversion repository (supported on bigtable)
  • Coming soon:
    • File Downloads
    • Issue change notifications
    • …

Cool Tools for Geographic Applications

Speaker: Schuyler Erle

http://labs.metacarta.com/

Using MetaCarta technology for nothing (or close to).

  • GIS and the Neogeographer: Neogeography is not GIS, it is about GPS, Google Maps, Mashups, etc

OpenLayers

http://openlayers.org/

  • API for building web map apps
  • AJAX
  • Open source

Gutenkarte (Using GeoParser)

Gutenkarte GeoParser

  • Taking text (like a Gutenberg project book), feed it to a GeoParser API, getting the place names out of the text and producing a map with all those places marked (with, for example, name sizes linked to the frequency with which each name is referred to)

The Google Data API

Speaker: Frank Mantek

http://code.google.com/apis/gdata/

  • Data presented in ATOM and RSS formats

Google kinds

  • Calendar provides:
    • event
    • time
    • status
    • …

Queries

  • REST filter model
  • Returns items

Writing

  • Update: “POST” to an URI
  • Delete: “DELETE” to an URI
  • Insert: “PUT” to an URI