[Geowanking] light weight waypoint server

[Robert Woodard]

First, a quick thanks to Mikel for starting this thread on my behalf. I'm
neither Geo-literate or RDF savvy, but I've been hacking together a "Geo
Paddle" web based tool for the Chesapeake Bay area of the US. This tool is
primarily geared towards those that kayak/canoe in that area. 

Geo Paddle was built on Worldkit, with the project initially using hand
written RSS xml files. As the project grew to 1000 waypoints, I knew that
using this flat file format was getting unwieldy and queried Mikel on light
weight waypoint servers.

Being impatient, I hacked together a little perl to toss my existing
waypoints into mysql and then hacked together a little php to build the RSS
data required by Worldkit on the fly based on a bounding box. Once
accomplished the database grew overnight from 1000 waypoints to over 14,000
with the help of USGS data.

Since xml is really only a data transport language between applications, it
is fairly trivial to change the output of my php program to match any future
changes/standards implemented by Worldkit.

I did look at the GeoServer 1.1.0, which weighed in at around 25 mbytes in
size. A bit heavy for my little project and appeared to be written in Java,
and I just didn't have the time to learn enough about it to try and
interface into it in a timely manner.

I looked over several of the proposals for handling this type of data. I can
only suggest anyone wishing to work on a 'standard grammar specification'
work closely with the W3C to eliminate duplication of effort and increase
the likelihood of getting broad acceptance.

Anyhow, the Geo Paddle project is coming along better than I had hoped. Some
future enhancements are planned as I have time to work on them. You can take
a look at:

http://www.kayaktrips.net/geo/


Woody
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