Facilitate search for 'nearby' projects and people

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Use case:
- If I'm in an institution I may be interested in what projects there are 
at my institutions or other institutions in my city or just in my city.
- When on a certain project page, I can be interested to see what other 
projects there are in the same city/area

Thoughts on solution:
- Projects are usually distributed and collaborative in nature which means 
there are multiple locations
- People are usually primarily bound to one location
- The PIMS export we use for import in Simal contains information on the 
institutions, but name only (QryProjectInstitutionsForSimal.xls).
- There's an interesting app being developed at the ASF that does 
geographically nearby searches on FOAF (I think foaf:based_near and 
geo:Point, xmlns:geo="http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos#")
- ASF's app is in Django, source @ 
https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/comdev/nearby_people/
- Info on ASF dev-community list @ 
http://markmail.org/message/o5equ4pbyfsgka6u

Original issue reported on code.google.com by sander.v...@oucs.ox.ac.uk on 7 Jan 2010 at 9:32

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We should collect geographic data for people as well as projects in order to 
allow 
searching for people.

We can often get the city from the URL (e.g.oxford.ac.uk, manchester.ac.u)

There may be a pre-existing database of university geo-locations. I'll ask Tony 
Hirst, he may know if there is such a thing.

As a committer on the ASF project you refer to I plan to build a Wookie Widget 
for 
that project to provide the necessary UI. Assuming that I actually do this all 
we 
will need to do is provide a suitable REST API for this functionality.

Original comment by ross.gardler on 7 Jan 2010 at 11:29

• Changed title: Facilitate search for 'nearby' projects and people
• Changed state: Accepted
• Added labels: Component-Core, Priority-High
• Removed labels: Priority-Medium

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I asked on Twitter. Paul Stainthorp pointed me towards 
http://www.scit.wlv.ac.uk/ukinfo/

This resource doesn't look complete, but it sure is an excellent start. It's 
created by  
Alix Bergeret, but the copyright on the geo-location data is unclear. I've 
emailed Alix 
for info.

Original comment by ross.gardler on 7 Jan 2010 at 4:16

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Sam Easterby-Smith suggests using the data in Wikipedia - 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_universities_in_the_United_Kingdom

This is a great idea as it is very complete, but we need tools to extract it.

Original comment by ross.gardler on 7 Jan 2010 at 4:25

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I think there is good RDF data extracted from Wikipedia via dbpedia:

e.g.

http://dbpedia.org/describe/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdbpedia.org%2Fresource%2FLondon_Sc
hool_of_Economics&sid=7011

http://dbpedia.org/describe/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdbpedia.org%2Fontology%2FEducation
alInstitution%2Fcountry&sid=7011

Trying now but I can't seem to make it work :(

Ah, this seems to work (@ http://dbpedia.org/snorql/ )

PREFIX geo: <http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos#>
SELECT * WHERE {

?university <http://dbpedia.org/ontology/EducationalInstitution/country>
<http://dbpedia.org/resource/United_Kingdom> ;
geo:long ?long ;
geo:lat ?lat .

}
LIMIT 100

Original comment by jameshow...@gmail.com on 7 Jan 2010 at 5:28

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Brilliant, thanks James.

Wilbert Kraan also tweeted an example using dbpedia:

http://tinyurl.com/yenwsox

He uses

PREFIX dbo: <http://dbpedia.org/ontology/>
PREFIX georss: <http://www.georss.org/georss/>

SELECT DISTINCT ?place ?university WHERE {
     ?university rdf:type dbo:University.
     ?university dbo:country :United_Kingdom.
     ?university georss:point ?place.
}
ORDER BY ?university

but notes that this does not give a complete list, we need to DIY if we want a 
more 
perfect solution (fair enough).

Original comment by ross.gardler on 7 Jan 2010 at 11:05

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[deleted comment]

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Original comment by ross.gardler on 10 Mar 2011 at 12:26

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