ZoneTag can suggest your location and tagging information based on cellphone tower, zipcode or latitude & longitude. The last piece of the tagging system I’m working on is the suggestion engine, so this was of great interest.

I gave it a quick test run, and predictably, it’s a case of feast or famine. A request for my home town of Baldock in the UK produces two results – “Plinston Hall” and “Letchworth” – so not entirely useful. More fruitful was a request for the location of the London Eye – you’re deluged with a plethora of data – here are the “venue” tags it suggests:

Waterloo, cleopatra’s needle, Eurostar, Downing Street, Eagle, London Eye, Guard, Waterloo Station, Parliament, Somerset House, Whitehall, Westminster, Memorial, skyline, Big Ben, Embankment, Thames, graffiti, Hungerford Bridge, Dali, SW1, horse, Eye, Banksy, train, Trafalgar Square, National Theatre, St Martins Lane, trains, station, Ferris Wheel, bridge, river, Guards, church, SE1, pub, Waterloo Bridge, Protest, IMAX, Horse Guards Parade, Wheel, River Thames, Charing Cross, Underground, View, sign, Southwark, House, Tube, Palace of Westminster, Horse Guards, Red, night, London Aquarium, Victoria Tower, england, sky, UK, Lion, long exposure, blue, statue, Trafalgar, Lambeth, Millenium Wheel, Demonstration, Peace, Anti War, Bus, Elephant, Europe, Clock, Nelsons Column, Street, Oxo Tower, Guess Where London

Perhaps a few too many there, but still, not a bad result. As it’s an experimental beta, not sure we can use it directly for Geograph, but it might serve as a useful comparison for our own suggestion engine. We could even offer a compatible service based on our own data too…

I’d love to throw it at some Geograph squares – some of the more touristy squares have oodles of PhotoSynth fodder.

There are a few areas we need to be sure of before incorporating OS maps into the site:

• Can an OS grid reference be included in a CC licenced work?
• Can we display an OS map alongside a CC sharealike licenced work?
• Can someone create a CC licenced geolocated work by clicking an OS map to indicate position?

Thorny questions, and the OS have (quite rightly) spent some considerable time pondering them. Our overriding concern is “protect the archive” – we want to ensure the archive can continue to grow and remain free (as both in speech and in beer) forever.

I think we’re almost there…

Can an OS grid reference be included in a CC licenced work?

Technically, the OS “own” the national grid system, and their right to refuse to allow someone to use it has been upheld in recent case law. Since the project is based around the grid system, to find we are unable to create geolocated works using national grid references would be something of a showstopper. Thankfully, the OS regard using a National Grid Reference (NGR) to indicate a point of interest is a legitimate use over which they can have no influence.

So it seems the OS is happy to allow us to create CC licenced works including an NGR. Even if they weren’t, we could switch to maintaining an archive of works where the geolocation data was a WGS84 latitude and longitude, and then simply derive an NGR from that ourselves. In the event anyone “came after us”, the original archive can remain intact, just our derived works become voided.

Thankfully, it seems we are on safe ground.

Can we display an OS map alongside a CC sharealike licenced work?

I covered this one in my May article – the resulting page as a whole is not a derivative. The page is a collective work, and we’re free to include content on that page using different licences. The individual image remains CC licenced, but the entire page content is not.

Can someone create a CC licenced geolocated work by clicking an OS map to indicate position?

Here’s where is gets surprising. After several months of thought, OS have said “yes”.

Is that the sound of jaws dropping?

OK then, it’s “yes….but”.

If someone were to attempt to recreate a map using geolocated metadata from the collective works, that person would be leaving themselves open to legal action by the OS. If our theoretical defendant produced Geograph-derived works in his defence, the OS would argue the geolocation had been derived from their property.

In addition, Geograph itself would not be held liable for the action of this third party.

So, on the face of it, it looks good. The cloud in that silver lining is that building maps from metadata in Geograph images is not recommended. Even something simple like extracting all photos of churches with a 10 figure NGR, and then submitting them as points-of-interest to OpenStreetMap could be (in the words of Egon Spengler) “bad”.

So what next?

I’m writing this to hopefully spur some more debate on our use of Creative Commons licencing. Our aim is to support the maintenance and growth of a free and useful photographic archive. Ideally forever.

If we can get through the next few decades without the services of a team of lawyers, I think we’ll manage it.

The original project was distributed on laserdisc and accessed with a BBC Master micro, but is now available online at www.domesday1986.com. The interface is a copy of the original BBC interface, and looks archaic to the hypertext-savvy web generation. I believe there are contractual reasons for keeping it that way:

Last year I got in touch with George Auckland at the BBC who was involved with the original production. I enquired whether there was any possibility of incorporating the data into Geograph. While he was excited by the prospect, it turns out they don’t have the rights on the content beyond the original Domesday Project
because of “the rather specific way the project was referred to in the paperwork”.

Looks like we might have to wait until the 22nd century to make something more useful out of that data, but I (and George) live in hope that it will be sooner than that.

Geograph archival

Although Geograph is backed up nightly to multiple locations, we’ve a plan to make an “archival” version available via bittorrent, which would be the JPEG images and XML based metadata. We’ll burn copies to whatever is backup-media-du-jour too. Hopefully we’ll ensure it is preserved for future generations!

We’ve tried contacting the British Library a number of times to see if they’d be interesting in holding an archival copy for their Digital Object Management Programme, but they never reply to our emails. You’d think a snapshot of Britain and Ireland comprising 250,000 photographs would be worth hanging onto….

The new Geograph setup should wind up with around 10GB of memcached space across 5 nodes, and I was hoping to do something similar for session storage. It sounds like the Digg system barely broke a sweat doing this as their memcached nodes were already being hit much harder by their main application.

If it’s good enough for Digg, it’s good enough for Geograph!

The supplier for this lot was World of Computers and they’ve been very helpful in my dealings with them. They were recommended to me and so far they’ve been great. They even deliver the stuff themselves in their own van. I like that. It might cost them a bit more, but they can be sure it’s taken care of in transit and is received by the right person. Nice

Geograph is a spare time project and I’m on an absolutely monster schedule for the next few weeks to launch a new product, so it could be several weeks before we get these babies racked up. I’ll write more about the architecture of the new setup as I do it…

Seems appropriate to me!

http://www.carbonneutral.com is a site that allows you do this, and our power consumption would be counterbalanced by planting 3-4 trees a year. The Carbon Neutral folks will do this for £10/tree, which is great, but I’d much rather have something like this done by people connected with the project in some way.

So, let’s say I want to see 5 trees planted before the end of the year – does anyone have any contacts or ideas on how we might get this done?

Tomorrow’s release of “Ubuntu 6.06 LTS” includes a Server Edition which will be supported for 5 years, with a “certified” LAMP application stack. The certification is primarily to do with MySQL, which I’ve found to be problematic to build from source in the past, so this sounds good to me!

I’ll give it a whirl when it’s released, but if it delivers a low-maintenance LAMP server supported for 5 years, it will hard to resist using it for Geograph. I’ve no doubt they’ve got a great set of packages for LAMP, but one thing in particularly I’ll be looking at is installation of the packages necessary to support LVS based clustering.

What to call them?

I think it’s a trait of all geeks to want to give their equipment cool or amusing names. At one of my first jobs in Newcastle we named our equipment after our favourite drinking establishments. I remember I had Trillian and Baltic. All of my own gear has Star Wars names. I’m writing this on Geonosis but it will pass through the frozen wastes of Hoth on its way out into the big wide world. My family photo album is on Naboo.

It’s not sad, just human nature, honestly.

Anyway, we’ve got 5 servers for Geograph, and I’m appealling to the happy bunch who inhabit the site forums to come up with the names.

I’m thinking rodent based names will be popular given our insistence the current server is powered entirely by hamsters….

What Geograph currently runs on…

• 700MHz Celeron server with 512MB RAM and 70GB hard disc space

…and what it will be running on

• 3 x application servers with dual 3Ghz Xeon CPUs and 4GB RAM
• 2TB storage server with dual 3Ghz Xeon CPUs and 4GB RAM
• single CPU load balancer / cache server
• full remote IP power switching and KVM for all hosts

It’s hard to compare the two setups, but I’d say the new configuration is around 40-50 times more powerful. It’s like trading up from a skateboard to an Airbus A380.

While this will provide a much needed boost in site performance for our present site contributors, some of that horsepower is needed to ensure we can cope with the increased traffic from educational use.

I’ll write more about the process of configuring the hardware over the next weeks, but for now, that’s enough to whet your appetites!