On 15 Nov 2006, at 21:40, Robert Tansley wrote:
> maybe for papers about the thermo-optical properties of chalcogenide
> glasses, a bit more imagination is needed.
We put our heads together to see what our collective imaginations
could come up with, and voila
The Researcher FlightPlan: http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/perl/local/
maps/flightplan?id=47
This is an EPrints plugin that takes all the conference/workshop
papers presented by a particular author (in this case Professor David
De Roure) in a particular time period and plots the locations of the
conferences using Google Maps. The locations are joined by lines
indicating the chronological ordering of travel around the world.
This could be a very useful tool to help find out where your senior
academic colleagues are, will be or have been (depending on whether
the repository contains pre- or post-prints).
Disclaimer: the flightplan is approximate, as the mashup took place
in an afternoon. In particular, conference locations (a standard
EPrints metadata field) were looked up in a gazeteer, and so some
place-name disambiguation needs to be implemented (Paris France or
Paris Texas?) Also, not every conference paper has had its location
metadata entered. Also, not every place name has been matched yet!
Also, we haven't integrated the map into the normal repository
interface as it is a production system!
Still, it is a demo of the power of the Google/Yahoo/name your
favourite web company Web 2.0 APIs.
<SHAMELESS_ADVERT>
We are so taken with these ideas that we have decided to include a
selection of Web 2.0 display filters in the forthcoming release of
EPrints v3, along with the Web 2.0 input autocompletion facilities
that have already been requested. Longitude/latitude will be a
standard metadata field for all eprints, so any repository manager
can enable geographic metadata and map displays for their deposit
materials.
</SHAMELESS_ADVERT>
--
Les Carr
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