How to use this community

What is this community for?

This community exists to help people to use geobrowsing tools (virtual globes, geo-websites) in scientific work.  You can use this site to:

• share hints and tips
• share geobrowser-friendly scientific datasets you have produced or come across
• share software tools (e.g. to convert data to KML)
• share files
  
• publicise new applications of geobrowsers and papers you have found or written
• publicise relevant conferences and report back via the blog
• ask for help from the community

What is this community not for?

There are plenty of places where you can find general material about geobrowsers, KML and so forth. Here are some of them:

• Google Earth home page
• Info about KML
• Google Earth blog
• Ogle Earth
• Google Earth hacks
• (please add more if you find them!)

Feel free to link to this material where relevant, but we do not intend to create Yet Another Site Where People Play With Google Earth (and look for nude sunbathers...)

How do I use this community?

If you have something you'd like to share with the community (and the whole world) please post an entry in the community blog.  You can make your entry as private as you like, but we encourage you to set "Security" to "Public" (if you're comfortable with this) so that your entry can get to as many people as possible, and can be discovered by search engines like Google.

Keywords, keywords, keywords... 

In order to make sure that people can find your entry easily, please use appropriate keywords (the current version of SciSpace does not support free-text search so keywords are very important for discovery). You can use any keywords you like: if other people have used the same keyword, it will turn into a link that you can click on, so you can automatically find related articles - nifty! Keywords are not case-sensitive. We suggest that you use at least one of the following keywords to categorise your post:

• tools if your post is advertising a new tool (e.g. KML converter), or is a question about the use of a tool or something related
• data if your post is advertising a dataset in a geobrowser-friendly format
  
• howto if your post is about "how to do something", e.g. "How do I view transects in Google Earth?"
• papers if your post is publicising a paper you have written (or come across)
  
• help if your post is a request for help (you can remove the help tag once your question has been answered so it will no longer show up in searches)
• ogc if your post relates to OGC Web Services. You can in addition use tags like "wms" and "wfs" to be more specific about the service you're talking about

(Click on one of the keywords to find existing posts in those categories.)

Getting alerts

If you want to receive notifications, for example when someone responds to one of your blog posts, go to "Account settings" in the top-right of this screen, then enter Yes for "Receive email notifications".  (I think this is enabled by default anyway.)

RSS, Live Bookmarks etc

SciSpace will auto-generate RSS feeds, which you can use in a variety of applications to syndicate content.  Many web browsers (e.g. Firefox) will treat an RSS feed as a "Live Bookmarks" folder.  For example, if you click on the following link: http://scispace.niees.group.cam.ac.uk/geobrowsers/weblog/rss/, Firefox (and other browsers) will recognise that this is an RSS feed and offer to create you a live bookmarks folder, which is a folder of bookmarks that updates itself automatically to give you quick access to the articles in the Geobrowsers community blog.

Most pages on this site have RSS feeds, so you can create bookmarks for pretty much anything you like.  For example, http://scispace.niees.group.cam.ac.uk/geobrowsers/weblog/rss/kml is an RSS feed of all items in the Geobrowsers blog tagged with "KML".  Also, http://scispace.niees.group.cam.ac.uk/geobrowsers/weblog/rss/help will give you a feed of all the outstanding cries for help (if there are any).  You get the idea.

jonb, 5-Jun-2007 13:02 (GMT)