Jeroens blog

Maps and Semantic Maps 0.6 are now available for download. Maps 0.6 requires Validator 0.3, which is included in the release distribution, and can also be found on SVN. Semantic Maps 0.6 requires Maps 0.6, Validator 0.3 and Semantic MediaWiki 1.5.1 or above. See the download page for full dependency and compatibility tables.

This is a big update, including a lot of new features, bug fixes, security patches, and most of all, internal improvements, making both extensions more modular and extendible (these changes are not covered here, see the relevant change logs for more info). It is also the first release of Semantic Maps that requires you to run the SMW update script, as it requires a new table layout to store coordinates (more info on this).

Let’s have a look at the various new features.

• Maps now supports real coordinate parsing and formatting, which allows you to input coordinates in any of the supported notations at any point in the extension, and can also request any output to be in the notation of your choice. This means you can now choose what format Semantic MediaWiki shows coordinates in, such as in ask queries. The supported notations are DMS, decimal degrees, decimal minutes and floats. All those can be either directional or non directional. A new parser function has been added that allows you to convert between any of these formats: #coordinates.

• New geographical functions: #geodistance and #finddestination. You can use the #geodistance parser function to calculate the geographical distance between two points, from and to any of the supported formats. The #finddestination parser function can be used to find a destination given a starting point, an initial bearing and a distance.

• Related to the new geographical functions is a rewritten distance query in Semantic Maps. It now takes into account performance and is scalable, which the old query was not, by using the new storage structure for coordinates. The notation for distance queries has also changed. Instead of using the like operator and a global distance parameter ( like #ask:[[Property: :~coordinates]]|distance=42 ) you now only have to specify your distance locally in the coordinate criteria itself like #ask:[[Property: :coordinates (42 km)]]. Like you can see you can now also specify a unit, which can be any of the supported ones.

• Support for various width and height notations. Previously Maps only accepted width and height values is px, forcing you to use maps of fixed sizes. Since most people want to have their complete page width visible even on small screens, this resulted in a lot of people using rather small maps, and so wasting screen space. 0.6 allows you to specify the size in px, ex, em, and most importantly, in %. The syntax is what you’d expect: width=”420px”, width=”420em”, width=”42%”. width=”420″ will default to using px, so is backward compatible. When using the % values, maps will even adapt their size when the screen width or the height of the container they are in is changed after the page has loaded

• Not a new feature, but rather one that’s removed: OSM support. The OSM service has been completely removed from Maps and Semantic Maps as it was rather broken and not easy to upgrade to the internal structure of Maps 0.6. I’m planning to add it back later on, rewritten from ground up, in 0.6.1 or 0.6.2 or so. Note that you can still view OSM maps on your wiki using the OpenLayers service, which has build in OSM layers, and also allows you to define your own layers since 0.5.5.

• And many more

The most notable bugfixes are:

• Fixed conflict with prototype library that caused compatibility problems with the Halo extension.
• Added automatic icon image sizing for Google Maps and Yahoo! Maps markers.
• Various security fixes, mostly preventing XSS attacks.

If no serious bugs are found in this release, a minor update can be expected in a month or so.

View announcement on the mapping wiki.

Downloads

• Maps 0.6 [ zip, 7z ]
• Maps and Semantic Maps 0.6 [ zip, 7z ]

One of the big changes in the upcoming 0.6 release of Semantic Maps will be the from the ground up rewritten semantic datatype for Geographical coordinates. Although the changes themselves do not directly add any value for the user, they enable some pretty neat improvements to existing features, and the creation of many new ones. In this blog post I’ll first go over the changes that are made, in a technical manner, and then sum up the effects they have from an users point of view.

The SMWDataValue extending class for coordinates, which was previously part of Semantic MediaWiki, and only recently moved over to Semantic Maps, has had a big overhaul. This class, now called SMGeoCoordsValue, used to parser coordinates all by itself. Considering Maps also parses coordinates, this is pretty dumb, since the code is redundant, and even worse, does not behave the same way, resulting into incompatible output. I rewrote all the parsing and formatting code in an as modular fashion as possible, and put it in a new class in Maps, which is MapsCoordinateParser. SMGeoCoordsValue now does all formatting and parsing of values via this class

Markus recently added a hook to Semantic MediaWiki that allows for extensions to define their own database tables for storage of semantic values with a specific signature, which will be part of the upcoming SMW 1.5.1. Semantic Maps is using this hook for storing coordinates in a table with lat and lon fields, both floats. This is a huge improvement to simply storing the coordinates in non-directional float notation with the elements separated by a comma, in a string field. The new layout allows for much faster lookups since the values can be index, esp. for things like the soon to be re-implemented distance query, and opens up a lot of new possibilities.

As a user, you will not notice any of these changes, except maybe that things that where broken will be magically fixed when using this new code. Semantic Maps now has settings that allow you to specify the output format of coordinates in queries though, so you can now view them in a different format then non-directional floats, like you where obliged to in the previous releases. You can pick any format supported by Maps, for example directional DMS, as show on the screenshot. Another change is that you will see new functionality based on the new table layout, like, but not limited to, the distance query.

Edit: There actually is one thing you’ll definitely notice as a user when upgrading – you need to update your semantic data via Special:SMWAdmin in order for your wikis coordinates to be stored in the new table. If you don’t do this, queries for coordinates won’t return anything. It’s sort of annoying you need to do this, but there is no way around it.

I’ve been working on Maps and Semantic Maps 0.6, the next big, awesome, release of both MediaWiki extensions, for over a month now. I also released an early alpha on the 3th of April. All planned new features have been implemented, and known bugs from 0.5.x have been fixed. So you might wonder why 0.6 is still not out.

In response to the possibility of someone doing work on Maps and Semantic Maps during the upcoming Google Summer of Code, I took a critical look at the current structure, holding into account all the things I learned over the last two month while working on Storyboard. I came to the conclusion that a bunch of things ought to be handled in a cleaner fashion, and started to refactor this code. The most difficult part here is changing how the display_map and display_point(s) parser functions handle their mapping service parameter and validate the provided location(s). I’ve been wanting to change this since 0.4, but didn’t since it’s rather tricky to do. I decided to finally get this done now, and have done most of the work. To complete these changes, I’ll have to make some rather complex modifications to Validator, which can take a while to complete. That’s the last thing that needs to be done before the 0.6 release though

I estimate this should be done in approximately 2 weeks, maybe sooner. After that I’m planning to release at least one RC, to ensure stability and complete awesomeness, cause really a lot has been changed. I figure about three quarters of the codebase has been changed in one way or another!

After this release a lot of cool new features can be added, which I might do before the GSoC coding period starts. There are also a few people who wanted to do a mapping project for GSoC at the WMF, but did not get accepted, which are planning to do some effort here after all, which is totally awesome

During the past two weeks I’ve been putting some effort in making some big changes to the source of Maps and Semantic Maps, and adding some awesome new features. Although not every to-do for the 0.6 release has been completed, I’ve made an early alpha version available which allows you to try out some of the exiting new functionality. So let’s have a look at the most notable changes since 0.5.5.

New features

• Support for various width and height notations. Previously Maps only accepted width and height values is px, forcing you to use maps of fixed sizes. Since most people want to have their complete page width visible even on small screens, this resulted in a lot of people using rather small maps, and so wasting screen space. 0.6 allows you to specify the size in px, ex, em, and most importantly, in %. The syntax is what you’d expect: width=”420px”, width=”420em”, width=”42%”. width=”420″ will default to using px, so is backward compatible. When using the % values, maps will even adapt their size when the screen width or the height of the container they are in is changed after the page has loaded See my wiki for some cool examples. Although this is really basic functionality in a way, it’s awesome to finally have it available.
• Added full support for DMS, DD, DM and float coordinate notations, both their directional and non-directional variants. This means you can now enter coordinates in these notations in the display_point(s) and display_map parser functions, as well as make Semantic Maps recognize them as geographical coordinates. Smart geocoding support has also been added to #geocode, meaning you can now pass along coordinates as well as addresses, so you don’t have to double check if your passing along an address to prevent losing the value.
• Coordinate formatting support. Along with the smart geocoding support, #geocode now also accepts 2 parameters to specify the output notation. Since you can pass along coordinates, this means you can change the notation of a set of coordinates using #geocode. A new parser function, #coordinates, has been added specifically for this purpose, so for pure formatting, you should use this one rather then #geocode. Both parser functions work with a hybrid parameter system that supports several ‘default’ parameter (ones that consist of only a value, and no name) and named parameters. You can work with names or without for the default ones, and the default ones in #geocode are the same as the old parameter order, so backward compatibility is retained.
• Rewrote map html and js output. This is now done in a cleaner, safer and more consistent way, for all mapping services in both Maps and Semantic Maps. This is not a new feature, but such a big refactoring it’s worth noting.

More to come…

• Native support for geographical proximity queries in Semantic Maps. This will require quite some work to do in a clean and efficient way, so will probably one of the last features finished for 0.6.
• OpenLayers 2.9 support. Since Maps 0.1, it has been supporting OpenLayers 2.8, and 2.9 is just about to be released, so It’ll be nice to see the progress made there.

On top of these changes to the extensions, I’m drastically redoing the documentation and examples. I’ll post more about that later on though

I created 2 brand new Ohloh projects for Maps and Semantic Maps. This is really cool since I can now analyse my own commit behaviour for those extensions better, as well as see contributions by other people in a more graphical way. It’s also sort of a win that I got the project named ‘maps’ there. Now time for some eye candy widgets of these 2 projects

References

• Maps Ohloh project
• Semantic Maps Ohloh project

I created a new MediaWiki extension titled “UK geocoding for Maps“, which I released yesterday.

The goal of this extension is to provide a way to display UK postcodes on Google Maps maps, by extending the Maps extension. Since obtaining geocoded postcodes for UK Postcodes via Google services is only possible using the Google AJAX search API, the standard geocoding infrastructure of Maps could not be used, and this extension should be seen as a sort of hack. Initial development for this extension was funded by Neill Mitchell for Prescient Software Ltd.

Version 0.1 is an experimental release, in which multiple issues are expected. I’m hoping to polish the whole extension a little more once I have some free time. Bug reports are welcome though.

You can get version 0.1 from SVN at

http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/trunk/extensions/UKGeocodingForMaps/

Yesterday I released Maps and Semantic Maps 0.5.4. This is a minor update which mainly brings additional stability and security to the 0.5.x branch. It contains several bug fixes, a few code improvements and some security fixes. Check out the Maps change log and Semantic Maps change log.

The only new functionality is that you can now define OpenLayers layers in your LocalSettings file, as well as layer groups. This is done by modifying the $egMapsOLAvailableLayers, $egMapsOLLayerGroups and $egMapsOLLayerDependencies arrays, which are defined in Maps_Settings.php.

Another noteworthy point is that Semantic Maps now contains all the geographical coordinate format handling that was part of Semantic MediaWiki earlier on. The code has been removed from SMW itself, and the SMW 1.5 release will be the first one without it. A nice side effect of this is that people still using Semantic Google Maps (one of the extensions Maps and Semantic Maps are based on, which is now obsolete (and really should not be used any more!)) will be forced to switch over to Maps and SM if they want to get the latest SMW.

Both extensions now use Validator 0.2.2, which is a minor update to 0.2.1, which was used in 0.5.3.

Downloads

• Maps 0.5.4 [zip, 7z, svn tag]
• Maps and Semantic Maps 0.5.4 [zip, 7z]
• Semantic Maps [svn tag]
• Validator 0.2.2 [zip, 7z, svn tag]

Today I released Maps and Semantic Maps 0.5.3. Both releases mainly include bug-fixes, some of which quite important:

• Fixed JavaScript bug causing all OSM maps to fail. Pretty important yeah
• Fixed issue causing a fatal error when executing a query on Special:Ask with the “map” format.
• Fixed issue causing PHP warnings with the type and types parameters in the Yahoo! Maps form input.
• Fixed OpenLayers form input projection bug, causing the the coordinates to be wrongly interpreted. The amazing thing about this bug is that it has been present since somewhere between 0.3 and 0.3.3, without anyone reporting it. It was caused by an error in coordinate conversion between regular and spherical Mercator projections.
• Fixed marker display for the OpenLayers form inputs.

I also discovered an oversight in the hook system of Maps, which is kind of a dormant bug, that could have caused errors for certain implementations of extensions to Maps. The oversight was that a mapping service does not necessary support a sub feature, like the parser function display_point, of a feature, like the parser functions. A check is now in place, together with a defaulting mechanism that also allows you to set the default per sub feature. I’m planning on changing this to a more recursive algorithm in the future though.

A last change is the adding of initial Google Maps v3 support. It’s only implemented for the display_map parser function, and has a rather limited set of customisation parameters at the moment, not to forget a whole load of issues. My conclusion from trying to implement this is that the GMaps 3 API is definitely not in it’s final state yet, since it’s lacking vital methods needed for basic functionality. The support for GMaps v3 is therefore sort of an alpha release, and won’t be put on the documentation page until it’s more stable and complete.

Downloads

• Maps and Semantic Maps 0.5.3 (zip)
• Maps and Semantic Maps 0.5.3 (7z)
• Maps 0.5.3 SVN tag
• Semantic Maps 0.5.3 SVN tag

As you can see, I changed the location of the releases from my forums to 2 brand new Google Code projects [ Maps, Semantic Maps ].

Over the last week I’ve done some effort to update the Maps usage examples on my wiki to match the current version of Maps. Since I hadn’t made any real change to them since 0.3, most examples where seriously outdated, and in some cases even caused people to use deprecated syntax. Now all Maps examples have been updated, the example pages have been restructured, and new navigation bars have been added.

You can check out the examples on the following pages:

• Maps examples
• Google Maps examples
• Yahoo! Maps examples
• OpenLayers examples
• OpenStreetMap examples

A screenshot of the Maps documentation page:

I’m also busy with updating the Semantic Maps examples, but that’s still a work in progress.

It’s been quite a while since the last release, but 0.5.2 is finally here! It’s not a big release, but features quite some fixes and improvements in the area of marker and pop-up layout.

You can now specify the icon to be used for all markers for both display_point(s) in Maps and result formats in Semantic Maps. A template= and showtitle= parameter have been added to the result formats as well, allowing you to remove the title from a pop-up, and further specifying what should be shown, in which format, by using templates.

On this map you can see that several markers use different icons. This is now easier then in previous versions due to a bug fix.

This map is created by Semantic Maps by querieng some demo data on my wiki. The title of the location is hidden by setting showtitle=no, and the template parameter is used to have a nice little text with the queried data in it as pop-up, contents.

Downloads

• Maps and Semantic Maps 0.5.2 (zip)
• Maps and Semantic Maps 0.5.2 (7z)
• Maps 0.5.2 SVN tag
• Semantic Maps 0.5.2 SVN tag