Sperrobjekt Weblog by Matthias Gutjahr

Mapping ist ja einfach nur ein Hobby von mir. Seit ich vor einigen Jahren die Community-betriebene Openstreetmap entdeckt habe, faszinieren mich die unterschiedlichen Facetten dieses Themenkomplexes ungemein. Regelmäßig lese ich einige Mapping-Blogs, unter anderem OpenGeoData. Dort wurde gestern ein Hinweis auf ein neues, offenes Routing-API von MapQuest gepostet. Routing und Navigation waren bisher eigentlich immer so die Punkte, die ich als noch zu jung und experimentell und meist für den Praxiseinsatz unbrauchbar empfand. Das könnte sich nun ändern, denn der frei zugängliche Routingdienst von MapQuest setzt im Hintergrund auf Daten der Openstreetmap.

Interessehalber habe ich die Dokumentation mal überflogen und dieses Beispiel minimal abgewandelt, um den Dienst testen zu können. Funktionert 1A! So sieht das Ergebnis aus (bitte auf "Route berechnen" klicken):

Route berechnen Ausblenden

First, there was Optimus, now Glenn Jones at lab.backnetwork brings us ufXtract, another online Microformats parser. It was created with a specific goal in mind, namely in order to help explore the real world issues of creating portable social networks. So, for a start, ufXtract's main focus seems to be a set of Microformats related to social networking: hCard and XFN, rel-me, rel-next, and hAtom; but it can detect many others as well, even the quite complex hResume. Output formats comprise plain text, XML, and JSON. ufXtract is written in C# and seems to be pretty fast, although I cannot really compare its performance to that of Optimus.

I think this is great work by Glenn, and I'm curious about the demos he is going to add. Go ahead and check it out yourself, or click on one of the following links to see some demo output of this blog's contents:

• JSON output of this blog's hAtom/hEntry
• XML output of this blog's hCalendar
• List of this blog's tags

It's been silent here for too long, but that's because I have a lot of work to do on various projects. Other people are working, too. Two days ago, Dmitry Baranovskiy announced the release of Optimus, an online service that transforms microformatted XHTML pages to nice, clean, easily digestible XML, JSON or JSON-P. This is achieved by the informed and heavy use of XSL Transformations. Optimus currently filters out events (hCalendar), addresses (hCard), blog entries (hAtom), resumes (hResume), reviews (hReview), and many more, so every important Microformat is covered. The great thing is that Dmitry has released all the XSL and XML files required for the transformation (under this Creative Commons license, I figure?). This means that everyone can set up her or his own transformations. I can only start to think of all the good uses we can put this to.

See example Optimus output of the blog entry before this one.