Victorian photographers API now also alphatastic

Didn't manage (didn't dare) to upload this before going-home time on Friday. There is now another string to the bow of the nascent REST alpharama here. You can query the people in the database of 19th Century photographic London (pardon the contraction) at the PhotoLondon website we launched recently. Right now, it only sends you back a list of people matching your criteria (100 records per page) with no details. I will soon produce a detailed machine-friendly record page for each person (an example of a human-friendly one is here)

The querystring takes most of parameters you can see on the form including surname, forename, search text (but not multiple words like the form), gender, year of birth/death, "alive in..." year, place of origin, photographic occupation, non-photographic occupation, and presence of attached images. Here's an example search so you can see what you'll get back right now. Here's a wider one.

There are bugs, no doubt, and it will be of more use when I can send you the person's details, as well as a list of countries and occupations to build queries from. I realise I also need to write some proper documentation. Still, it's a start. Please tell me if it might be useful to you, and what you'd like to see it doing/do with it.

Made an API

No, not a collections database interface, Mia's onto that one. But I'm scheduled to work on the events database about now, and with the mashup day (now full up, I think) coming it seemed a good idea to grab a day and finish off this job. For ages we've had an RSS feed which gets a lot of use, including consumption by sites like dockland.co.uk, and of course search functionality onto the events web pages, but the feed is (a) a bit basic and (b) just shows everything for the next 14 days.
I wanted to turn the static feed into a properly searchable REST interface, as well as load it with more good data. So I plugged a hole whereby only a start date could be specified, put in filters for audience, event type, and keyword (like the web pages), and neatened up the separation into XML. Now it can be churned out in raw straight-from-the-database XML or in RSS 2.0 with extra hCalendar. I've got a couple of tweaks to make (adding in addresses and geo data) and then will invite the world. The plan is that you can set the format in the query string, so RSS2 will be one option but so will xCal (as used in Upcoming's XML) and whatever else - it'll just pick up a stylesheet and apply it on the fly. There are more filters I could apply, and documentation to do. Then thinking about pagination with OpenSearch extensions... and then who knows. Most of it will wait, so I'll post soon with the details on the where and how.

OSGB-lat/long web service for GIS

We have loads of geographical information. Trouble is, it's almost all in OSGB grid reference form, which is no good for feeding to apps like Google Maps. Worse, much of it uses old-style 100km squares (mainly TQ, which covers London). We've taken a couple of approaches to this - hand-making a few maps in Google (for example, our Olympics work is mapped here), and using batch processing scripts from ESRI or others to manipulate the data in the geographical fields of our archaeology database, creating latitude and longitude values to accompany the OS grid references. However there is still a good set of data that needs another approach - for example, our site summaries for the last decade and more are available online. These XML-driven pages contain only OSGB data. I plot them very crudely onto our own ESRI-based map application, but would much rather have KML to work with.

So to the point. I came across a great script on the Hairy Spider site that also runs a web service. I wanted to take this further so that (a) I could pass in lots of values, not just one at a time (b) it could handle the TQ-style syntax (c) not keep on hitting friendly Mr Spider's server. The code available is for the convertion from OS eastings and northings to lat/long only and I've not tried to reproduce his "proper" web service, but I do now have something that will work for my needs. I can pass in a querystring like

gr=tq709098,SW465987,tl123456,51232456,512300245600

and get back something like:



50.8618352280453
0.431144625126249
tq709098


50.7318874223712
-5.59642485933937
SW465987


52.0968934973257
-0.358719120254802
tl123456


52.0968934973257
-0.358719120254802
51232456


52.0968934973257
-0.358719120254802
512300245600



[note that the last three values in the query were all for the same grid reference but in different formats, producing the same lat/long]
For me this is pretty useful. I may well extend this to take more parameters and pass out KML, but the main thing is having a means to convert the data on the fly over HTTP.

Many thanks to Hairy Spider for doing all the hard work on this. I've tested the outputs and they're very close to the OS's own tool, so good work HS!

Next thing is to use this. I'll let you know when I do, and we might also be open about making the service publicly available if that would be of assistance to anyone that might be reading this.

MS REST interface action

http://astoria.mslivelabs.com/
didn't get far with this, it's been draft for weeks...