Map Annotation

This describes a forthcoming feature, expected to be released in February 2013. It is not generally available yet.

Introduction

This page provides information about interactive annotation of the University Map. If you are interested in scripting or programming overlays from other data sets, see the UCamGeoJSON API.

Note: if all you want to do is create a link to show your department etc on the map, you don't need to create any annotation. Just use the link shown in your browser address bar when you are looking at the full results for the institution. For example: http://map.cam.ac.uk/Department+of+Geography . This also means if you move, the link will show up-to-date information without any changes.

Also if you only want a single pin on the map, you can do this directly from the map: click where you want it and choose the pin icon. Then copy the URL from the browser address bar.

This page deals with more substantial annotations.

Why?

It is useful to be able to customize the University Map. This might be for

• something ephemeral, like emailing directions or highlighting a meeting place to someone;
• something semi-permanent such as locations of a series of events around the University (for example, consider the Cambridge Shakespeare Festival, or Science Week);
• something permanent, such as more detail or special interest information (for example, consider disability information, college staircase locations, college meeting rooms, or the Granta Backbone Network).

Where?

This is achieved by referencing in the map URL a set of annotations stored at a another URL somewhere on the internet. This could be

• temporary storage provided by the map server itself,
• your personal University web pages,
• a departmental website,
• a shared Dropbox file (or other cloud service)
• anywhere, really, subject to certain security limitations

This URL is given in the fragment part of the map URL, that is, the bit after a hash sign '#', like this

 http://map.cam.ac.uk/#http://some.annotations.com/annotation1.json

How?

The link provides a set of data in UCamGeoJSON format. This can be generated programatically where you have a geographically-minded data set to display, but for more casual use interactive Map Annotation, in effect to draw on top of the map and then save your annotations for other people to refer to.