Occyd : tagging for locations

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Andrew Perry
on February 14, 2009
in android, code, occyd, python and software
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Occyd Map View (search results)

Those who have been watching may have noticed I quietly started developing an Android application in the last month or so. It’s still super-buggy and far from feature complete, but I thought it was time to announce it here (”release early, release often”). It’s not ready for real users yet, but developers may like to take a little look.

Occyd (-k d .. sounds like rockied or oggied) is an application for tagging geolocations, aimed at GPS-enabled network-connected devices. It currently consists of an Android client, and a server backend running on Google App Engine. The (evolving) API is simple enough that it should be easy to write clients (or servers) for various platforms. The idea is to enable people to tag locations on the surface of the planet with a list of keywords, just like they can tag web pages with delicious. They should also be able to search for tagged locations, based on tag(s), on distance from their current location and recency of the post.

Occyd posting screen

Here’s one possible elevator pitch (for a very long, slow elevator ride):

“You are a member of a large bird watching club. Your members like to record where they have spotted various species, and use Occyd to share the locations at which they have sighted various birds. You are out in the park, when you spot the rare Orange Bellied Parrot. You pull out your Android phone, fire up the Occyd client which automatically knows your location via GPS, and tag that current location ‘orangebelliedparrot parrot birds’. You then decide to see if others have spotted parrots in the area. You search for ‘parrot’ in the Occyd client; a map appears showing the locations of all the other sightings tagged ‘parrot’ in your vacinity. You tweak the search settings to show only ‘parrot’ sightings within 100 metres and 14 days … on the map you see that your friend RobHill spotted an Orange Bellied Parrot here last week – looks like the numbers of this population are recovering !”

Occyd searching screen

Ponder for a bit, and I’m sure you can think up at least a handful of other great uses (tagging good fishing spots, favorite cafes, or maybe even sightings of parking inspectors :) ).

As with any new project, there are lots more ideas than time to implement them (and I have a day job that doesn’t involve Occyd …). The Occyd Android client and Occyd GAE server source is currently available under the GPL v3 on GitHub, and I’m keeping all my documentation and notes on the Occyd Android client wiki provided at GitHub. Watch this space ….

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The Occyd : tagging for locations by Andrew Perry, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal License.

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  • February 14, 2009 at 12:23 pm Andrew Perry
    Neil: You can write a client for Symbian / S60 on Nokia for your new N95 :) (but I'd wait until the server is a bit more mature).
  • February 14, 2009 at 3:00 pm Richard Akerman
    kind of like http://graffit.io/ for the iphone
  • February 14, 2009 at 4:13 pm Andrew Perry
    Thanks for pointing me to Graffitio. From what I can tell, Graffitio doesn't allow you to 'tag' Walls where conversations are occuring ... so while it's loosely similar in that it's a social geolocation app, Graffitio seems quite different in intention (although I don't have an iPhone to check it out, so I'm just going on what I've gleaned from their blog).
  • April 8, 2009 at 4:48 pm Steve Koch
    I happened to read this blog today (yeah, very late I know). I don't have an iPhone or android, so I don't actually understand much. But it did remind me of an idea I had a few months ago. It would be cool to be able to tag geographic locations with needs for volunteer work. E.g., tag an area "needs a few people to volunteer for a Saturday to fix playground." etc. With enough users (i.e. a ton of users), it would be a cool way of making it easy for people to find nearby & suitable volunteer work.
  • April 11, 2009 at 10:13 am Andrew Perry
    That's another good idea to add to the list Steve. I'm hoping to make it generic enough that things along those lines should be possible. For 'flashmob' organization of volunteer work, I can imagine that social networks (including twitter) may work better (eg, see this post by Don Park about how twitter has guided his weekend activities http://bit.ly/Q6q5b ), although tagging locations to indicate where events are happening would be a good complement.
  • April 11, 2009 at 10:17 am Andrew Perry
    Development has slowed in the last few months, but it hasn't stalled (I started this project while I was still not sure if I'd have a job at the start of this year ... then got my fellowship). I'm thinking that Occyd could feed tagged locations into Twitter using the LL:lat,lon convention for locations, and #hashtags. Just need to establish a way to prevent it becoming too spammy.

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