Earlier this month Simon Price and Nikki Rogers attended the JISC Conference 2010 in London. Nikki, the Visualising China project manager, was an invited panel member on a discussion session about maximising creativity of software developers and lessons learnt from earlier ILRT projects under JISC Rapid Innovations programme. Simon, one of the Visualising China developers, gave a demonstration presentation of the latest release of the software and a sneak preview of the forthcoming release.
The demo gave a whirlwind tour of the existing image cross-searching and annotation features described in earlier posts on this blog, before moving on to briefly look at the new capability allowing users to link external resources to the existing knowledge base, for example, adding a flickr image as a referable, annotatable, searchable and visible item. Finally the new, soon to be released, map view was shown. The map view overlays both geographically located items, such as photos of a location or people or events, on top of a selection of different map backgrounds. Backgrounds include third-party maps Microsoft (Bing) Virtual Earth, Google Maps and Yahoo Maps as well digitised renditions of historical maps of China.
