Facebook Open Academy Interns

We've got interns!  Let's see what they're up to.

Drop shadows with 3D?  Yes, I went there.

Wait.  What?  Interns?

Stanford and Facebook run an internship program for open source projects.  It's course credit for doing a bit of work.

As part of LocationTech, I applied for a few slots.  Last weekend I was holed up at Facebook with five talented students.  They're working on a variety of projects with WhirlyGlobe-Maply.

In a few weeks, we might do some guest posts.  For now here's an overview of what they're up to.

Web Feature Service

WFS is used by a big segment of the open source geo community.  It's for communicating vector data from server to client.  Well, the parts we care about are.  Among other projects, it's used in Geoserver.

The project is to interface WG-Maply to WFS.  Mostly that means reading Geography Markup Language (GML).

Keyhole Markup Language

KML is Google Earth's native format.  It's evolved into an interchange standard for vector and other data.  You can encode vector data and image tile sets, sure.  You can also encode behavior and paging.  Oy, it gets complex.

This project is to read KML into WG-Maply.  Probably just the static features for now.

Marine Traffic Visualization

Did you know you can see real time ship movement data online?  Cool.  But wait, it's also collected by a network of volunteers.  If that doesn't make you want to stick an antenna on your roof then you have no soul.

Anyway, the project is to visualize this data.  Perhaps with history, perhaps in real time.  We shall see.

NASA MODIS Browser

If you haven't played with the NASA (near) real time MODIS data, then go do that.  Come back when you're done.

This project is to put together a similar interface with WhirlyGlobe.  Should make a nice example, plus, NASA imagery.

Summary

This is a pretty neat set of projects.  Indeed.  Any code will be published open source.  Some will make nifty examples, others will be merged into the WhirlyGlobe contributed collection.