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FH-Potsdam / shifted-maps

Shifted Maps visualizes personal movement data as a network of map extracts showing visited places.
http://shifted-maps.com
GNU General Public License v3.0
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Feature request: generic data importer #50

Open TwizzyDizzy opened 8 years ago

TwizzyDizzy commented 8 years ago

Hi folks,

I would very much like to have the possibility to import my GPS data into shifted maps. Therefore I'd like to first establish, whether this is possible in general:

Installing the moves app on your phone is a nightmare for anybody concerned with her/his privacy.

Cheers Thomas

lennerd commented 8 years ago

Nice you still on this idea!

Installing the moves app on your phone is a nightmare for anybody concerned with her/his privacy.

Totally agree on this. Unfortunately like a maybe explained already the Moves API is great in the way that it already recognises GPS data/movement in a certain area as place you visited. This way, we were able to concentrate on the visualisation and didn't need to work on a smart algorithm to distinguish between places and connections – one of the most complicated things I can imagine when working with GPS data on maps.

But still. I think the idea is great and if you feel comfortable I would love to see some PR for this. I think a very good starting point would be to find an algorithm able to convert GPS data into stays at certain place. I'm certain there is something out there we maybe "just" need to plug in.

TwizzyDizzy commented 8 years ago

Hi Lennart,

alright, then my assumption was right, that shifted-maps doesn't calculate the places by itself. And going further: Moves may even be generating the places from a lot of different sensors on the phone, right? It could use the gyroscope, could use cell and wifi information and stuff. So it's not even clear whether moves generates it's spots from GPS data only, right?

Before continuing, I might add that I'm not programming (well bash and perl sometimes, but no nodejs).

That being said: I dug a bit around and the internets came up with these papers concerned with algorithms to extract locations from raw gps data:

https://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/ptnurmi/papers/nurmi_mobiquitous06.pdf https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3637118/ https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221612427_Algorithm_for_Detecting_Significant_Locations_from_Raw_GPS_Data

Still, from doing a quick search only, I haven't found any node implementations of an algorithm doing that. It's probably worth digging around a bit more though.

Cheers so far Thomas

lennerd commented 8 years ago

Thanks for the good research. I only have limited time to work on this project at the moment. So to everybody interested in being able to use other data sources than Mine and having some skills in Node.js (it's not that difficult 😉 ) … PRs are welcome. I'm also open to discuss this further and maybe able to help here and there with some Node.js and ShiftedMaps insides.