RE: Another SVG challenge -- virtual weather station

aloha, david!

thank you so very much for your reply and for stressing to your 
students that it is the underlying data that needs to be repurposable,
not "just" to accommodate the "disabled", but also those for whom a 
visual medium is inconvenient or even dangerous, given the situation
in which the informational query is being made...

if i can be of any further assistance to you or you would like to 
continue this dialog, PLEASE do not hesitate to let me know, on-list
or off-list...

as a side note, one of the W3C groups in which i am a "participant
in good standing" is the Rich Web Applications Backplane Incubator
group, precisely to keep the concept of the serving most appropriate 
content from raw data, rather than providing an after-the-fact 
accessibility overlay, foremost in the XG's minds; of course, as i 
stated, the output, no matter the modality, should be as accessible
as possible, but the need for the same basic data set served in as 
many contexts as possible should be the end goal for the weather 
information distribution service so that those who need information 
quickly and accurately conveyed to them, no matter what the circumstance, 
has that ability...  this is one of the reasons why the news exchange 
formats (a.k.a. the NewsML effort - http://www.newsml.org/) is so 
intriguing, as the "suite" of "news exchange formats" (all XML-derived
languages/dialects) now includes "EventsML" and "SportsML", and i need 
to investigate whether or not SVG is addressed/used by the news 
exchange formats as the optimal visual representation format for 
news-oriented institutions and companies...

glad to have been of assistance, gregory.
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It is difficult to say what is impossible, for yesterday's dream is 
today's hope and tomorrow's reality.           -- Robert P. Goddard
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Gregory J. Rosmaita, oedipus@hicom.net
      Camera Obscura: http://www.hicom.net/~oedipus/
             Oedipus' Online Complexes: http://my.opera.com/oedipus
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---------- Original Message -----------
From: "Dailey, David P." <david.dailey@sru.edu>
To: "Gregory J. Rosmaita" <oedipus@hicom.net>, <public-svg-ig@w3.org>
Sent: Fri, 7 Nov 2008 10:00:21 -0500
Subject: RE: Another SVG challenge -- virtual weather station

> Fascinating Gregory,
> 
> I am sorry to admit I had not even thought about accessibility 
> issues in this context. You've opened a new perspective on it 
> for me. Providing an interface to that backplane of data for 
> unsighted populations would no longer consist of just 
> entertainment or nerve-soothing value (as I had considered it) 
> but, in the situations you outline, important. I talked about 
> your ideas in class this morning.
> 
> Cheers
> David
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: public-svg-ig-request@w3.org [mailto:public-svg-ig-
> request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Gregory J. Rosmaita Sent: Thursday, 
> November 06, 2008 3:31 PM To: Dailey, David P.; public-svg-
> ig@w3.org; svg-developers@yahoogroups.com Subject: Re: Another 
> SVG challenge -- virtual weather station
> 
> aloha, david!
> 
> instead of SVG-fits all, wouldn't it be wiser and more useful to 
> repurpose the data in conformance with the profile -- software, 
> hardware, delivery speed, the user's needs at that moment -- and 
> user-side settings and preferences of the consumer of this 
> information?
> 
> i'm not arguing against "accessible SVG", or your vision of a "virtual
> window", which i personally find quite appealing, although i 
> wouldn't be able to use it, because i am blind...  but it isn't 
> myself that i have in mind as i compose this, but those cases 
> when a sailor, for example, or a tourist canoeing in a park or 
> wilderness area to needs stroke prefers that this info be 
> communicated to them verbally or in another medium less 
> distracting than the interpretation of a visual representation 
> built upon raw data that SHOULD be expressed as SVG, and as 
> accessible SVG as possible, but SVG MUST not be the user's only option...
> 
> this is an issue that i've worked on in the abstract and in 
> practice with a few blind sailors' groups and weather 
> information distributors -- the graphical representation is 
> being generated based upon the underlying data collected by many 
> means -- a "smart" weather information distribution system would 
> take that into account...  in your example, you used as an 
> initial data point the user's location, which could be 
> determined by IP address, GPS, or direct query via a simple 
> form: postal code, longitude & latitude, and the like, to obtain 
> accumulated data for that specific geographic location on earth -
> - yes, it is not only very cool that that data could be 
> transformed into accessible SVG, but that is not the optimal nor 
> can it be the ONLY data transformation available from the 
> weather information source, for like me, who is blind, those 
> engaging in concentration-intense activities, such as rock 
> climbing, white water rafting, trekking across a glacier, or 
> other similar situation....
> 
> again, my reply is NOT an argument against your proposed 
> exercise -- on the contrary, i support and encourage it (i'd 
> like to be able to check out the weather on the serengeti or 
> keep tabs on the polar ice caps), but when serving data from a 
> backplane, it must always be remembered that the best data is 
> that served in a manner most suited to the requestor at the time 
> of the request, as well as providing a means of accessing the 
> information contained in the generated SVG for those checking 
> the weather on their computer in the morning because they can't 
> determine if the sky is cloudy, clear or grey...
> 
> gregory.
> --------------------------------------------------------------
> You cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of
> focus.                                           -- Mark Twain
> --------------------------------------------------------------
> Gregory J. Rosmaita: gregory@linux-foundation.org
>    Vice-Chair: Linux Foundation's Open Accessibility Workgroup
> http://a11y.org                          http://a11y.org/specs
> --------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> ---------- Original Message -----------
> From: "Dailey, David P." <david.dailey@sru.edu>
> To: <public-svg-ig@w3.org>, <svg-developers@yahoogroups.com>
> Sent: Thu, 6 Nov 2008 09:32:25 -0500
> Subject: Another SVG challenge -- virtual weather station
> 
> > For maybe five years now, I have given my Interface Design 
> > students a wide variety of possible final projects to choose 
> > from [1]. There are a few several on which nobody has made much 
> > progress over the years. Today someone showed me a demo of a new 
> > beta desktop environment (called BumpTop [2]) would work. It 
> > reminds me of some of what I've been talking about in terms of 
> > "physics in layout" and the <superpath> idea, and presents some 
> > very intriguing concepts for interface. Anyhow, they have a 
> > little widget thingy that starts to look a bit like the virtual 
> > weather station I've been asking my students to do. Given that 
> > the idea is starting to reinvent itself outside of my own little 
> > world, I figure it's time to try to challenge some folks other 
> > than my students (if for no other reason than to save someone 
> > the agony of accidentally trying to patent something for which 
> > prior art already exists).
> > 
> > So here's the challenge:
> > 
> > Some people work in offices that have no windows. Let's build 
> > one for them.
> > 
> > Make an SVG page that determines the visitor's geographic location
> > (based on IP address, or direct query through a form).  Next 
> > artificially generate an animated depiction of what the weather outside
> > would look like based on current weather data (e.g. 
> > precipitation, wind velocity and temperature data) from the 
> > National Weather Service), the visitor's latitude and longitude, 
> > the time of day, and the time of year. How light or dark it is 
> > should vary as a function time of year, latitude, humidity and 
> > cloud cover.
> > 
> > For example, if it is currently raining heavily and the wind is blowing
> > very hard, and it is noon in October in Nome, and the 
> > temperature is -3 C, the sky will look rather different than 
> > similar circumstances at
> > 17:00 in Miami at a warmer temperature.
> > 
> > Overall weather categories (like rain, snow, sleet, hail,
> >  sandstorms, etc.) should be chosen from some relatively 
> > international weather vocabulary if such exists.
> > 
> > To depict a windy day when there is no precipitation or airborne 
> > sand, one may wish to draw artificial trees and or clouds, to 
> > show the effect of the wind.
> > 
> > The best entry will receive the largest smile so tell all your friends
> > and neighbors.
> > 
> > David
> > 
> > [1] http://srufaculty.sru.edu/david.dailey/cs427/projects.htm
> > 
> > [2] BumpTop demo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0ODskdEPnQ
> > 
> > [3] new features for SVG
> > http://srufaculty.sru.edu/david.dailey/svg/Spec.html
> ------- End of Original Message -------
------- End of Original Message -------

Received on Friday, 7 November 2008 18:38:49 UTC