Open source relationship mapping/visualization APIs? - actionscript-3

A local group is mapping the relationships between board members and various organizations around my town. I am trying to help them get some visualizations together.
The visualizations focus on relationships between people and organizations eg who is on which boards and will be drawn dynamically. I am assuming I will be generating XML via PHP or Perl in order to feed the map drawing engine.
I am hoping to find a mapping API/library like the one for
http://www.theyrule.net/ > Popular Maps > Amazon.com
Anyone seen anything like this?

http://polygeek.com/4613_actionscript3_mapping-api-adobe-flash-platform

This looks promising!
http://code.google.com/p/canviz/
demo of CanVis: http://www.ryandesign.com/canviz/
and CanViz or similar is under the HTML 5 hood of
http://wordvis.com/

Related

QuadTreeProvider and WFS data

With each passing day I'm getting more and more annoyed with Cesium.
There was a project that used QuadTreeProvider to create 3D structures from WFS data.
But the Cesium guys saw the 3D stuff was more lucrative and not only created difficulties to create WFS primitives but created mechanisms to avoid all types of use other than its "Ion 3D tiles".
Now, any kind of question involving 3D they answer with a commercial answer like:
"That sounds like the ideal use case for 3DTiles except for the
dynamic data. Depending on your needs and resources, you could always
contact Todd at todd#agi.com to talk about possibly getting your data
working with 3DTiles."
Of course we can contact Todd. But I don't want to! I want to use free 3D stuff. I WANT to use Geoserver WFS data Todd. Can you allow this for me? Can you allow this project to work again as before?
If you want to make money from your products, you have every right to do so, but don't stop users from creating their own solutions if they don't want to contact Todd.
After all, my question is: How can I use WFS data from Geoserver to create 3D objects in Cesium without need to use Ion / 3DTiles ?

Displaying names of countries/cities in russian language openstreetmap

I'm trying to implement maps service in my project. The project is focused to russian-speaking countries. But in future I hope to expand audience. The problem is that different services show different names.
OSM shows local names- for example Chinese towns are not clear for me. Google maps shows - user sees all names in the world in his native language: if a'm russian I can see all names in russian lunguage, including names of streets in USA for example. But Google maps costs a lot for me now.
How to solve the problem and what free/cheap services did you use? Сartography isn't the main feature in the project but important.
This isn't a full answer, but may be of some help. There are two ways of approaching the problem using OpenStreetMap data. 1. Russian names are sometimes provided: the tag is name:ru. However, there are very few of them. They're mostly for countries and major cities. For example, London has name:ru=Лондон. 2. But if you want everything which doesn't have a name:ru to appear in the Cyrillic alphabet, you'll have to transliterate from the most convenient source: the local name if it's in some easily transliterable script like Roman or Greek; or the English name (say) if not.
So, taking the second approach, the way I would do it would be to download the OSM data and pre-process it, inserting a transliterated name:ru where one did not exist, then render the map (using, for example, Mapnik, which is free), using a style sheet modified to use name:ru, where available, for all labels.
This, however, is an off-line solution. I realise that you probably want something on-line. Perhaps you could use Mapbox with on-line vector tiles, again pre-processed in some way before they are rendered.

Assign stores by areas using OpenStreetMap

A company has stores (lat/lng) located throughout the country, these are displayed using OSM. So far so good.
Now they have the requirement to assign areas/borders to their stores to define responsibilities. You can compare responsibility areas with those of post office (responsibility areas are determined and allocated by hand, it's not shortest distance). So if a customer is searching for a store (geolocation) the responsible/prefered one should get a special icon.
Is there a (gis) standard available to define/store areas/borders? Does OSM offer special functions to achieve this?
OSM doesn't offer anything for such tasks because OSM is mainly a database. But there are lots of applications and frameworks around OSM which can be very helpful.
Your question sounds like you want to visualize isochrones which is incidentally very similar to a question recently asked on gis.stackexchange.com about drawing isochrones on an OSM map. Does the solution(s) suggested for this question help you?

How do I get vertice data from google/bing maps?

I'm trying to develop a application that uses informations from google/bing maps, but I need the vertice data to recreate roads and I can't use images since I can't get road names and height info.
I need vertices/nodes of streets (with latitude,longitude,altitude, street name ) and no visual data.
Thanks.
Open Street Map is definitely the way to go for this - extracting vertex information from Bing/Google is both technically difficult, and a breach of the Terms of Use. OSM data is better quality in many cases and, more to the point, free to use under a CC-BY-SA licence.
You'll also probably need a spatial database in which to store the information. I've written a couple of articles about loading OSM data into SQL Server which you might find helpful. e.g.:
http://alastaira.wordpress.com/2011/04/15/loading-open-street-map-data-in-sql-server-part-ii-ways/

Finding Similar Artists with the Amazon Product API

I'm relatively new to the Amazon Product API and I am attempting to pull back similar artists to the artist on an item I am providing for the Similarity Lookup.
For instance using the following parameters:
ItemId='B00136JMX6'
Operation='SimilarityLookup'
ResponseGroup='ItemAttributes,Images'
Availability='Available'
SearchIndex='MP3Downloads'
I receive only other songs by Johnny Cash.
Is there a way to find other artists similar to Mr. Cash?
I've spent a lot of time working with both APIs and yes it is easy to get five similar artists from Last.fm then you could search based on those artists. You could perhaps use MusicBrainz... They also make use of ASIN numbers in their database. I don't make use of MusicBrainz much but it is another option I looked at.
Good luck!
My code in PHP for working with these APIs