Also check out the wiki version of this post.
Version 0.7 of both the Maps and Semantic Maps extensions is now available for download. This release is made after 3 beta’s and a release candidate, so should be stable.
The most notable new features in this release are tag extension support for all the Maps parser functions, more consistent error handling via Validator 0.4 and compatibility with the upcoming MediaWiki 1.17. Most changes are internal improvements, but there are also several bug fixes and minor new features.
Whats next?
There only big new feature on the roadmap for 0.7.x is the infamous images-as-layers one. This feature was supported by the now long obsolete Semantic Layers extension (example), and has been requested by dozens of people since the first releases of Maps. Next to fixing the bugs that show up, the focus will mainly be on adding new functionality. Feel free to propose new features, or help out creating them.
Jeroen,
love the SMW mapping work – it’s the heart of a lot of the things we do with observations at SwissEx.
One question; we have a lot of geo-referrenced scalar and vector data (i.e. temperature, wind speed and direction at a point, amongst many others). Is there an easy way to generate map visualisations of data?
For example, if my query tells me that a certain point has a certain value, set the size of an icon, or the color, or the label, accordingly?
In pseudo-code:
{{#ask: [[Is a::City]][[location::Germany]]
|?population
|?name
|format=googlemap
|icondata=population
|iconscaling=true
|iconlabel=name
|iconminvalue = 10000
|iconmaxvalue = 300000
}}
would give each city a icon labelled with it’s name and scaled according to it’s population in the range 10,000 to 3,000,000…
You can not do this unfortunately. The limitation is coming from SMW itself, rather then Semantic Maps. Currently there is no way to specify properties you want to use to vary the value of one or more available parameters in the result format. I’d love to see such capabilities implemented, as your case demonstrates it would be very useful together with maps. No one is pushing to get this done though, so I’m afraid this won’t happen any time soon unless someone can fund the development.