The interactive geolocation webpage (now that it’s fully functional again) is one of the best parts of the entire GigaPan website – rivaling if not surpassing even the basic GigaPan viewer interface. Nonetheless, it remains an underutilized part of this website. Although many users make the effort to at least basically geolocate their GigaPans, not all of them have the patience or skill to fine tune their geolocations. Moreover, many more users make no effort at all to geolocate GigaPans.

I would like to help. There are many GigaPans that I’d be willing to put in the time to geolocate, simply because I’d benefit from the added value of being able to view them in Google Earth. In the past I’ve requested a way to volunteer to geolocate (or improve the geolocation of) other users GigaPans to no avail. I’ve even gone so far as to spend hours trying to reverse engineer the geolocator so that I can at least create KML files of others’ GigaPans for educational uses. Unfortunately, this effort is hindered by the way the new website hides critical Javascript and CSS files. I’m not trying to create a competing service here – my first impulse it to freely reshare any geolocated GigaPans I’m able to create.

I think GigaPan Systems stands to earn a great deal of value by open sourcing the code behind the interactive geolocation page. Obviously I’m not asking for permission to write to the primary GigaPan database (I’ll create my own parallel database for the location data I’m able to create), though I’m happy to reshare that data and any improvements or innovations to the code I’m able to make.

Obviously I’m also interested to hear from any other hackers who have developed their own innovations for geolocating GigaPans.

Ron, thanks for taking the time to write these points on geolocation. Making the geolocation feature more available on the website is definitively a part of our conversation. And making yourself available for volunteered geolocation is greatly appreciated.

So that basically sounds like I shouldn’t hold my breath waiting for GigaPan Systems to help out, eh?

On the contrary. Ron, you have raised a great point about geolocation on GigaPan.com which is validating why we feel this aspect deserves further allocation of our development resources.

Going in and updating users’ gigapans is a touchy subject because it raises privacy concerns. Some gigapans are not geolocated on purpose.

Open-sourcing idea is non-trivial too since it requires evaluation of the business model, as well as the legal aspects. Neither is a light weight process.

If you are considering developing your own geolocation application, that’s definitively doable with the tools at your disposal: GigaPan API, Google Earth plugin, jQuery/UI, MySQL, Ruby/PHP. This direction will also give you the most certain outcome, and the complete customization of the geolocation process.

I am sensitive to the privacy concerns. Allow me to suggest a set of permission options (feel free to suggest improvements):

1) A per GigaPan option to “Allow others to suggest improvements to the geolocation of this GigaPan”. Default is Yes. If the user sets this to No then nothing changes from status quo.

2) As long as this permission remains set to Yes, any logged in user can attempt to (re)geolocate that GigaPan via the existing interface. Users who choose to do so will be able to see their own improved location by default. All other users will see only the original author’s approved location.

3) When a logged in user (re)geolocates a GigaPan, a message is sent to the original GigaPan author requesting approval of the new geolocation. When and if the original author approves the new location it is set as the default location for everyone. If the original author declines or does nothing, then nothing changes. (Only the person submitting the new location can see it.)

I can see that this isn’t likely to happen as soon as I’d like it to, so I guess I’ll go ahead with trying to “reinvent the wheel” on my own, which is what I’d hoped to avoid with this request. Tips and suggestions – especially regarding the implementation of interactivity with the real-time Google Earth plugin – would be welcome.