About GPS, points of interest (and map data)

[Andrew Turner]

First, a personal plug: I recently wrote a short book on modern
mapping & locative technologies that would be pertinent to developers
and advanced users of devices like the Neo1973. It covers standards,
formats, existing projects, project ideas, and geo-communities.

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/neogeography/

Specific to the points here - I've used MaemoMapper for the N770 and
it is a good application that could be supported and ported to
OpenMoKo. It appears similar to Cairo, but is probably more mature and
supports various mapping systems (Google, Yahoo, and OpenStreetMap).
Therefore, you can cache map tiles to the Neo1973 for display without
necessarily having to use your data connection.

As for contributing back to OSM (OpenStreetMap), it would depend on
the actual accuracy of the AGPS. If the error is low, then data would
just be saved as GPX tracks and could be uploaded back to this central
repository and then later downloaded as Map tiles.

Last - for a "Central POI database" - it would be better to use an
existing mapping system, or even just aggregate many of these. For
example, someone could make their own POI's in
Platial/Wayfaring/Geoblog and then publish the data as GeoRSS
(http://georss.org). OpenMoKo devices would then just subscribe to
these feeds, or an aggregated feed via Mapufacture
(http://mapufacture.com), to get live POI's.

GeoClue (http://live.gnome.org/GeoClue) is an upcoming project that
could be ported that aims to provide location information across a
device to any application and then use this for publishing POI's to
blogs, GeoCMS (Midgard/Drupal/Plone), or geotagged photos.

For "GPSFriends" I would suggest looking at integrating with existing
systems such as Plazes (http://beta.plazes.com/) - so that you can
find friends that don't necessarily have an OpenMoKo device. Helps
prevent that 'empty nest problem'. Also, Imity (http://imity.com/)
just released their beta of their service that doesn't detect friends
by "location" (lat/lon/address), but just "proximity" (what bluetooth
mobile devices do I see near me when?). Both Plazes & Imity would be
great systems to write OpenMoKo clients for.

Look what's currently out there instead of redesigning yet another system.

Andrew



-- 
Andrew Turner
ajturner at highearthorbit.com        42.4266N x 83.4931W
http://highearthorbit.com              Northville, Michigan, USA