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List:       koffice-devel
Subject:    Re: visualisation of postal codes in marble shape via plugin?
From:       Johannes Simon <johannes.simon () gmail ! com>
Date:       2008-09-04 11:05:50
Message-ID: 200809041305.50600.johannes.simon () gmail ! com
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Hi Stephan,

I think that's even something the marble shape should support out-of-the-box. 
Essentially, you want to create a diagram. Your spreadsheet contains the 
labels and the values for the points on the diagram. The only difference is 
that you don't use the chart shape to visualize your data, but the marble 
shape. Ideally, their behavior should be as similar as possible when fed with 
a data source. It could automatically determine if your data for the points on 
the map is coordinates or zip codes, a really simple and quick algorithm could 
do that.

On the technical side, it could ask you if you permanently want to download 
the zip code -> coordinate database. That depends on how much storage would be 
needed, and how good it could be downloaded separately, depending on the 
regions you need.

I'm really interested in what the marble shape author and our marble co-
maintainer (yeah, that's you Inge ;) think about this.

Regards,
- Joh

On Wednesday 03 September 2008 17:04:44 Stephan Wassipaul wrote:
> Hey,
>
> I'd like to visualize (austrian) postal codes (which are stored in a spread
> sheet) on a map. So after some googling and finding out that I'd probably
> need to convert them to coordinates (which should be possible using the
> database from http://opengeodb.hoppe-media.com/index.php?FrontPage,
> although the site looks kind of outdated...), the koffice marble flake came
> to my mind. Ideally, I'd like to select a column of names, a column of
> phone numbers and a column of postal codes and then just run plugins ->
> visualise on a map. Now my question ist the following: Would it be possible
> to achieve my goal by writing a plugin taking advantge of the koffice
> architecture?
>
> If so, what exactly would be needed (sorry, I know the koffice architecture
> only from blog posts) and which programming language could I use?
>
> The problem is that I'm not a real programmer, only familiar with python
> (and a little bit php), but I could probably learn an other programming
> language pretty quickly as long as it's a scripting language. If the above
> is only doable using a non-scripting language, it won't be worth the effort
> (it's nothing really urgent, only nice to have), so that's why I'm asking
> here before digging deeper into the documentation... Also, I'm using
> Kubuntu 8.04 (still the KDE 3 version), so getting the current alpha up and
> running would be quite an effort (at least for me, I only switched to linux
> about a year ago, never compiled anything, never altered my
> /etc/apt/sources.list etc.), so I'd like to be sure that what I'm striving
> for is doable...
>
> If something of the above is unclear (which is easily possible since
> english is not my native language) or if you need further informations in
> order to be able to answer my question, please don't hesitate to contact me
> - I promise I'll write back as soon as possible.
>
> Thank you very much in advance for your efforts and for doing an impressive
> job on coding koffice!
>
> Best regards,
> Stephan Wassipaul
>
> PS: In case you're wondering why I'd want to do that: I'm a volunteer of
> AFS which is non-profit organization organising student exchanges. Being
> able to visualize postal codes would be handy for all kinds of things, e.g.
> when you need to find volunteers living close to a certain host family...
> (we assert a volunteer - serving as a contact person - to every exchange
> student).

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