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I am an amateur architectural historian and find this site fascinating. I have created project databases and bibliographies for various architects and was wondering if this application could be used to link project specific material. As an example, Neutra was widely published and the Kaufmann House has over 400 items in its bibliography. Could a simple click on the Kaufmann or any other Neutra house automatically link up to its individual bibliography. This would be of great interest for researchers, historians, real estate sales people, and home owners. I envision eventually combining this with Zillow and architectural databases, bibliographies, building and safety records, and county assessors databases into something that could give you the complete history on any building in the country that you could access on your I-phone or car GPS while you are driving down the street. How do we make this happen? Are Zillowand/or Google already working on this?
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jcrosse, thanks for you interest. I maintain this app, now. I also uploaded all the Neutra houses into freebase (including dates and location information). If I understand what you are saying: the Kaufmann house is referenced in many books, magazines, newspapers, etc. and we could store this reference information in freebase as well. Right? I think that would be great.
The simple approach would be to have a flat document that's "attached" to the "topic" (in this case the Kaufman House) which just contains a list of references. As you said, it would be great to have that document "pop-up" when the user clicks on something in Archiportal.
A more sophisticated approach would be to have each reference be a structured item within freebase:
- published work
- page #
- topic referenced
This would be more powerful in that one could perform a sophisticated database query like "show me all references to austrian architects from the New York Times" but it would be a lot more work, for sure.
What do you think? I'd be happy to help you with this.
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Google just enabled the Street View Api
You can lookup a LatLng to see if Google has a panorama of the building, and if so, embed it in a viewer.
That would be very cool!
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Great work Zak - this is a really cool app.
Here's some feedback:
* Skyscrapers checkbox doesn't seem to do anything
http://dev.mqlx.com/~zak/arch/index.html?q=1&architect=Michael%20Graves&archId=%2Ftopic%2Fen%2Fmichael_graves&city=Checking and unchecking doesn't change the display.
* Skyscrapers checkbox state is lost when you click a link
Visit http://dev.mqlx.com/~zak/arch/index.html
Click checkbox
Click Richard Neutra
* Skyscrapers checkbox should indicate what effect it will have
For example: "Only Display Skyscrapers (6 of 112 buildings)"
Exhibit is a wonderful example of faceted browsing: http://simile.mit.edu/exhibit/examples/presidents/presidents-2.html
* "Address is invalid" is an invalid error message :-)
http://dev.mqlx.com/~zak/arch/index.html?architect=&city=Edinburgh&cityId=%2Ftopic%2Fen%2Fedinburgh&archId=&q=1%2F#
St Giles' Cathedral has an error message "address is invalid". The address is correct. Here is the entry in the Phone Book: http://tinyurl.com/2nk27p
* I'd like to use the scroll wheel for zooming the map
* Refresh the display after editing Freebase data in dialog box
* Resize based on browser window?
Currently the app is 150px too wide for my display. The horizontal scroll bar is annoying.
Perhaps you could resize the google map on window resize?
* The placemark popups should have a fixed size
Currently they resize in an ugly manner once the article blurb loads-
great feedback. let me clarify/respond:
- searching by architect only and checking the skyscraper box doesn't work (error plus the checkbox doesn't keep state) searching by city and skyscraper=true does work (too bad that's all I tested)
- the form is not ajaxy. that's why when you're looking at a result set and you click on the checkbox it doesn't auto refresh. This is actually by design, you are meant to press Search after changing the filter inputs. We probably should get rid of the search button and fire off the request on demand. or at least do that for the checkbox.
- the skyscraper estimate is a good idea, why click the check box if you know it won't change anything? good.
- "Address is invalid, you're right, I was trying to be terse but maybe "Unrecognized Address" would be more informative? I believe it is true to say google did not know what to do with that address.
- scroll wheel for map sounds good. (maybe nice-to-have in light of all these other issues)
- refresh display, hmm. That takes a long time. Is there someway archiportal can discern whether the user actually did an edit in the iframe? The modal dialog is used to view data as well, in which case we def don't want to refresh the map/page when the user closes. Ideas?
- resize, yes, that's annoying, a must fix/improve
- fixed size bubbles sound good but isn't that going mean all bubbls will have to be large as a lowest common denom? Ideas?
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Hi Brendan,
Ah, I just assumed an ajax behaviour. You could stick with the current system but then you should visibily enable the search button when the form is changed.
About refreshing the display - it's a complex topic. I've started a dicussion on the developers list.
Rather than fixing the size of the bubbles, how about just of the height of the blurb div? It doesn't matter if some of the blurb is hidden.
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I've taken care of a few of these:
- searching with the sky scraper filter should work now
- I've dumped the custom scrollbar and made the default size of the map a little smaller. The map is re-sizable horiz but not verictally, haven't cracked that one, yet.
- changed the "Address is invalid" message
Here's what's left:
- make map bubbles size a little nicer
- google map vertical resize and/or enable scroll wheel
- ie6 is not showing the map at all, ouch
- look at making the form ajaxy, perhaps, or just make it more clear what state you're in: search is greyed out until the proper inputs have been made
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this is the initial spec zak is working of off:
ENTRY PAGE:
- take out the "| Add Info!" next to architects
- instead, put the dropdown arrow to the left of each architect. items:
- - map (do the search, same as clicking on the architect's name/link)
- - view architect (open up topic view in freebase)
SEARCH RESULTS:- take out the pushpin and "|" next to it
- omit the geocode from this view, it takes up too much space
- the hyper link for the building name can bring up the building on the map. buildings with no location will not have a hyper link
- a dropdown arrow will be to the left of every building. items:
- - map (bring the pushpin into focus on the map) grey out for buildings with a location
- - view/edit details (open topic in freebase)
- take out the blurb from this list, the user can view the blurb by bringing up the freebase topic view
- results for the pushpin dialog bubble will be in the same basic form with the same edit drop down arrow. The building name and geocode no longer need to be hyperlinks.
- In this dialog view, continue to display the blurb and geocode as there is more room for that here.
GROUPING:
architect result page (all buildings by an architect):- group results by city, sorted alphabetically
- each city is a table cell with an expand control arrow on the right
- by default the first city is expanded (with each building listed in chronological order)
- good news, there will never be an architect who designed 1000 buildings, so no need for paging or limiting results
city result page (all buildings in a city):- this a little more involved: as this data expands the result set could be very large, e.g. 2000 buildings in a city by 500 architects. I think the solution is: don't actually map the buildings. Simply list the architects (and how many buildings they've designed) and cue the user to "select an architect to map", then switch to the architect results page as above.
- I am aware that the query in the above case would be expensive further down the road, but as long as the result set is
- if the result set for a city is
- All of this regardless of whether the user checked the "Skyscraper only" checkbox
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a couple of additional notes for saving screen real estate:
- When the list of buildings by a given architect is grouped by city, there is no need to list the city in the address for every house
- In that case, you also don't need to list the architect for every house
- When you are listing all buildings in a city, grouped by architect, you also don't need to list the architect in every result
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Version 2.0 has been released! Great work Zak!
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[NOTE: These were originally posted to the Feature Requests property that isn't being used any more.]
When search by city only, include structures that have location info but no architect. Also, if a structure has no architect but does have an engineer (e.g. bridges) list them
Skyscraper check box: S.F. and L.A. are good examples of a problem: they have the complete works of some residential architects that water down the "by city" view. Skyscrapers are very cool, we should allow search by them exclusively to thin out the result set for the user
For city search start at a higher zoom - This is the killer pattern: if a city is specified, pick the first struture on the list that has a geocode and zoom to 5000 feet and start in satellite mode. This way the user is set up to really see how the app shines
Change loading image to something background-independent: http://www.ajaxload.info/ . (current one needs a white background)
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very cool. i love it! one additional thing that would be nice is a list of matches (building name, architect, address) separate from the map. maybe something like yelp does. i would like to be able to see basic info about all the matching buildings without having to click on the map. (the application i was thinking of was a walking tour -- the list would show you all the points on the tour, and the map shows you where the buildings are. then i could print the page and have all the info plus the map showing all the points on the tour.)
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That's interesting. It reminds me of http://www.communitywalk.com/ which might also be a nice source of inspiration for future features.
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I love this app... I especially love that you added the ability to add information to the listed architects. I think making freebase apps interactive in that way is the way to go.
So my feature request is even more editing:
- Link to add new architects altogether to the "portal" page
- Link to add new structures to the results view. (bonus points if there's any way to "pre-fill" the search criteria... i.e., for a results page for "Julia Morgan" in "San Francisco, CA" those values would carry through)
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