We have just launched one of our first visualisations which allows the user to search BBC News stories and see the results plotted on a 3d globe.
To see the visualisation, read about how it was created and watch a video demo please visit the project page.
Please let us know what you think of the visualisation using the comment form below. We’d like to know if you’ve built something like this, seen anything similar or would like to see any modifications to this application.
This is pretty cool. When are you going to release the source code?
Hi DannyB,
We will hopefully be releasing it very soon. Once the BBC legal people are happy we will put it up to download.
Tried out the visualisation by entering the word ‘transport’ and got some weird and wonderful results back – relocating the conservative manifesto launch to Chile, for example. The idea seems great but feels like a bit of work to be done yet.
Thanks Hugh,
You’re right, it does need some work. The problems lie with the geolocation API we are using to find places in the RSS text. The Yahoo service tries to be too clever and often finds places which aren’t there. For example it might see the word Sea and think you mean Seattle. I’ll have a think….
Cheers
Andy
how about mashing google earth and BBC’s news rss? then users could use GE’s layers to save lists of rss feeds?
Oddly enough I have been building a similar 2D version using breaking news stories and my own geolocation API. I think it’s better than yahoo’s version, it looks at people’s names, journalistic cliches and other meta-data to improve location.
Go to http://www.dusktodusk.co.uk and tell me what you think. I’m willing to share!
Tom Gatten
Hi Andy,
Nice work.
I’m planning a similar project and will likely use the custom BBC RSS feed.
I was going to take a reverse approach with geolocation which might solve your problem;
1) define your locations first by clicking on the globe or using known coordinates.
2) assign tags to the location e.g. “London” “Stansted” etc.
3) then scan the news RSS for those tags to assign stories to the locations.
This way you never have to bother with cartesian coordinates or Yahoo, and you can also customise your locations/regions of interest.
Do you ever get locations flagged on the moon?