Twitter to Fix GeoJSON Error

Well that was quick.

Twitter will be fixing the previously mentioned error in their GeoJSON X/Y ordering in version 2 of the Twitter API.

It’s great to see such a quick acknowledgement and response.

Twitter GeoJSON Error

Sean Gillies pointed out on Twitter today that the GeoJSON output of coordinates from Twitter’s just-released geolocation capability is wrong. Sean is one of the authors of the spec so, when I saw his tweet, I took notice. According to the Twitter documentation:

The XML response uses GeoRSS to encode the latitude and longitude. encodes as latitude, space, and longitude (see the response below for an example). For JSON the response uses conventions laid forth in GeoJSON which looks like

“geo”:
{
“type”:”Point”,
“coordinates”:[37.78029, -122.39697]
}

You will notice that this is in Latitude/Longitude order whereas the GeoJSON specification clearly states Longitude/Latitude.

This is clearly an error that will throw off any existing software that has been developed to handle GeoJSON. This is somewhat reminiscent of a similar issue with early versions of SQL Server 2008, with a lot of the same issues applicable here. The main difference this time around being that the GeoJSON spec is much clearer on X/Y ordering than the WKT spec was.

There seem to be a lot of clients already on board with supporting geolocation in Twitter so this could be a potentially large proliferation of this particular GeoJSON error. Twitter should look at correcting this before a lot of data gets out there.

Good catch, Sean. And, yes, it should have been noticed before now. Maybe we should look up from our iDroidBerries more often.

Happy GIS Day 2009

GIS Day is when the Great Map renders from its cache and slips around the world giving GPS units to all the good geographers.

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I work at a technology consulting company that does a lot of software development. A while back, we started using Redmine to manage our software development projects. Redmine is an open-source, web-based project management tool. It provides a lot of capability, is easily customizable without coding, features SCM integration and, since it is built on Ruby on Rails, can be extended using RoR as well. We are still getting comfortable with it but it has been meeting our needs well and has been well-received by our customers.

Does Vendor Lock-In Increase Health-Care Costs?

Today is World Diabetes Day. I am a parent of a child with Type 1 diabetes (also known as juvenile diabetes). As such, my child is dependent upon insulin and will be until a cure is found. I am using my blog today to discuss the issue of interoperability (or lack thereof) of medical devices.