This session was run by Pierre-Luc Beaudoin. Pierre-Luc said that this has feature been wanted for a long time and is just now coming to fruition. Emerillon is now available and in GNOME git. However, hostip just changed their API and, currently, the patch to fix geoclue's support for hostip's API hasn't been reviewed yet. (So geoclue is broken at the moment.)

Someone raised the issue of how security is managed in browsers and websites that request your Geolocation. Pierre-Luc said that a dialog will prompt you to send your location to the requester.

There was a question about what uses Pierre-Luc envisions. He said that the Contacts on a Map and geolocating Photos were immediate uses. Someone threw out that, later when social networking apps. are on the desktop, updating your geotag on, for example, Twitter, would be possible in an interactive fashion. (Mojito on Moblin was pointed to.)

Someone wondered what the format that comes from OpenStreetMaps is. Pierre-Luc said that it's currently tiles but there was a GSoC project to download the meta-data in raw XML format and render it via Cairo, locally.

There was a question about integrating with Google Latitude. Robert McQueen said that the Google API is rather backwards: you must constantly poke Latitude to get updates on your contacts.

A concern was raised about bandwidth needed and request sizes. Pierre-Luc said that OSM's servers are rather overloaded at the moment. Ted Gould from Canonical suggested pre-seeding the cache with all North American data, for example, for a netbook. There was a tangent about how much data you could download from OSM at once.

There was a question about letting Emerillon submit edits to OSM. Right now, a menu lets you open OSM in a browser and then edit the data.

Pierre-Luc demonstrated some some comparisons of OpenStreetMap to other online maps. There are lots of clear cases where the data in OSM is better. He demonstrated the integration of geographical data as well as public transit (mostly in Europe, right now).

He requests that everyone give Emerillon a try.

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