User:Vc-wp

Virtual Pinhead

Although I'm sure I've been called that before, no, I'm not talking about me. Its an idea for streamlining the generation of maps with a 'pinhead' marking the location of a given town, for use in wikipedia articles.

Components:

• A database of maps
  • various maps, all public domain, such as the ones available at here would be inputted into a database on [my personal] server. The database would contain the image, as well as the longitude and latitude at the UL and LR corners of the image.
• A database of placenames
  • Accessed via the USGS placenames database. This allows the searching for populated areas. The result of this query allows you to obtain the Latitude and longitude of the chosen placename.
• A web-based interface that allows wiki editors to specify a query
  • The user inputs a placename. The user selects from a list if more than one placename matches.
  • The user is presented with a choice of available maps (with descriptions) which contain the specified location. These could include world, continent, country, state, county-level maps, in either topographic, overview, or line format. For most purposes state-level would be sufficient, with country-level being sufficient in many places of the world.
  • An appropriately-formatted and compressed image is ouputted to the browser.
    • Optionally, the php could act as a bot and actually perform the uploading of the resulting image and insertion into the article.

Other points:

• For initial simplicity, the projections of the maps should all be the same (ideally). Research will be needed to see if this is possible or if the projections vary enough to rationalize allowing varying projections. Cylindrical projection maps, ie Mercator are easiest, and possibly most common. Cylindrical projections allow for an easy check (via a simple database query) to see what maps contain a given point, whereas with a more complex projection fairly intensive calculations would have to be performed for a much larger number of maps (to see if the given point was part of the solution set for an inequality given by the bounds of a set of equations with the specified UL and LR bounds of the map as parameters).
• Please let me know if you know of any utilities that already exist that make this easier. The most time consuming will be figuring out the lat/long pairs for the bounds of each individual map, as well as putting in sufficient maps to make the utility useful. Comments would be appreciated.