YES!!! Thank you Martin Jones.  http://www.ris.org.uk/homelesslondon
passes my 5-second test for responsiveness, and in what
seemed no time at all I was in the London Borough of my childhood and
wandering in imagination the banks of the delightful River Shuttle, which
at least in the summer would make even homelessness more bearable.  3
cheers for Resource Information Services and their site.

Chris May

----- Original Message -----
From: Martin Jones <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, March 14, 2002 1:34 PM
Subject: Re: Demo geographical front-end to cultural collections


> The use of mapping as a front end to information is of interest in the
very
> different world of advice services.  Colleagues in Resource Information
> Services (partners in our NOF project) are developing a website for the
> Greater London Authority to provide information on services for homeless
> people.  The site makes some use of mapping as one means of access to
> information about services, but also provides other routes - the type of
> service, or 'who for'.
>
> If it's of interest the beta test site is at
www.ris.org.uk/homelesslondon.
>
> Martin
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Humphrey Southall [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: 13 March 2002 21:40
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Demo geographical front-end to cultural collections
>
> Dear All,
>
> Many projects within nof-digitise are creating place-specific content, but
> how do we create a SENSE of place?  Obviously, if a collection comes
> entirely from a single small area, some kind of sense of place may be
> created simply by looking at it.  However, most projects cover areas
larger
> than most people's notion of a place -- a neighbourhood or locality, but
> certainly not a whole county let alone a whole region.  Sense of place
must
> therefore be partly about selection within a collection.
>
> However, it is less than obvious that simply providing some kind of
> geographical search engine, within a single site or via some kind of
> programme-wide portal, is all we need.  Some very old ideas from geography
> say that places are defined by site and situation;  by the land they sit
> on, and the other places that surround them.  In this sense, place is
about
> context as much as content, and we need to PRESENT our content
> geographically, not just provide a spatial search engine.
>
> ... all of which leads into some work the Great Britain Historical GIS
> project has been contributing to.  James Macgill of GBHGIS and Colin
> Chinnery of the British Library's International Dunhuang project have
> created a demonstration system that presents one vision of how a
> geographical front end to the BL's content might look.  A version of this
> demonstration is now on-line at:
>
>                 http://www.ccg.leeds.ac.uk/geotools/blpilot/MapKiosk.html
>
> Please note that address;  although it may look like part of the BL site,
> it is hosted at Leeds University and nobody is saying the BL will
> necessarily create such a system for itself, as part of its work for
> NOF-Digitise or otherwise (so please do not circulate this address widely,
> or link to it).  However, a presentation of the demonstration system to BL
> staff a few weeks ago seems to have created considerable interest.  NB the
> system now on-line is slightly cut down from the system shown
> internally:  a base map showing relief features ran off an overseas site
> and had to be removed for performance reasons, and some excerpts from the
> National Sound Archive raised IPR issues.  This means you can no longer
use
> the system to locate recordings of wrens singing, and then compare the
> songs of English, Greek and Taiwanese wrens.
>
> The demonstration system is hopefully fairly self-explanatory, but it was
> constructed using GeoTools, an open source toolkit for geographical
> visualisation of which James Macgill is the principal developer (see
> www.geotools.org).  Geotools is written in Java, so there are some
> restrictions on what browsers it will run within.  However, it has been
> written very carefully to use a limited "lowest common denominator" subset
> of Java, and we would claim it should run on just about any desktop PC
> unless you have tried really hard to find a SERIOUSLY obsolete
> browser.  The GBHGIS site itself is being designed so that reference
> enquiries will not depend on the use of GeoTools, and it is hard to
imagine
> anyone wanting to do interactive graphic visualisation on a mobile
> phone.  It would be useful to have some feedback on compatibility;  did it
> just run?
>
> The "BL" demo system enables users to select material by location and time
> period as well as type -- you can zoom in on particular areas, and narrow
> the time period via a "timeline" bar.  This obviously depends on including
> metadata over and above Dublin Core.  This is an area where there is a
good
> deal of development work currently going on.  Programme participants may
be
> interested in a meeting I am organising within the Social Science History
> Association meeting this October, on "Metadata for Time and Space".  So
> long as no-one drops out, this will include presentations on the
Alexandria
> Digital Library's Gazetteer Content Standard, the Electronic Cultural
Atlas
> Initiative's Timemap extensions to Dublin Core, English Heritage's
> Timelines time period thesaurus, the Federal Geographic Data Committee's
> standards, and a round table covering work in progress to add geography to
> the Data Documentation Initiative's standard.  At this point I have to add
> that the meeting is in St. Louis, Missouri -- but the real focus of most
> standard setting work is the US, and unless we interact with US projects
we
> cannot expect to have much impact on these processes.  I find it
irritating
> that we have been specifically forbidden to use NOF funds to attend such
> meetings, and a bit humiliating that I have only been able to get so
> involved through US bodies funding my travel.
>
> Geotools, incidentally, is ahead of any similar open source project
> elsewhere in the world, compares well with commercial alternatives which
> generally involve Windows-only plug-ins or ActiveX components, and
provides
> a significant part of the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative's technical
> infrastructure.  Being open source, anyone can use it free of charge, but
> it is a toolkit so you will need someone to bolt different tools together
> into an applet.  ECAI's Timemap Viewer (see
> http://www.archaeology.usyd.edu.au/timemap) is a general purpose and
> ready-assembled applet built from GeoTools.
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Humphrey Southall
>
>
>
> ======================================================
> Humphrey Southall
> Reader in Geography/Director, Great Britain Historical GIS Project
> Department of Geography, University of Portsmouth
>
> Buckingham Building, Lion Terrace, Portsmouth PO1 3HE
>
> GIS Project Office: (023) 9284 2500
> Home office:  (020) 8853 0396
> Mobile:  (07736) 727928
>
> Web site:  http://www.geog.port.ac.uk/gbhgis
>