Mooring Guides of the Future

You should see above an example screen shot from a barging 'path' viewed in Google Earth

This articles introduces some thoughts and examples of what the DBA moorings guide may look like in the future. The picture above is actually just a still from a moving image sequence I've created of a short sample trip down the Seine. If you have Broadband click on either of the links below to view the movie:

(low res movie) (higher res movie - very large file)

Furthermore the movie is just one of an infinite number of possible recordings taken from a virtual and interactive trip I've set up in Google Earth, in which you can zoom, steer, and generally wander about wherever you like. And, importantly, you will be able to easily add/update moorings, local shops and attractions, and not just to your copy of the guide but to everyone's!  I should add that  the movie is just to demonstrate the guide, the guide itself would be the interactive Google Earth path where you can stop, zoom in, change direction, change altitude, query add or amend a mooring location ('push pin') etc.

If you've never heard of Google Earth it would be worth while stopping here and reading about it at http://earth.google.com/

Since well before the new barges.org website I've been working with Bill Jaques on how to store and distribute the excellent moorings guides he edits (and you write!).  We set up an interim web page that allows members to request any guide just by clicking it.  If you haven't seen them there are just under 100 moorings guides covering most of Europe, telling you where you can moor, what the mooring is like, where the local shops are etc...  The web page hasn't yet been fully transferred to the new site but the old one still functions here:

http://www.barges.org/html/moorings1.html

Anyway writing that old page got me thinking about how we want to store the moorings guides, what should be in them and how they should be delivered.  Bill and I discussed it by email and it became clear that the crucial element in any successful guide is to involve members and get contributions from you.  Currently Bill does this by recording who has taken which guide and gently reminding them to provide updates on it after they have used it. 

What we didn't want to do was just make the guides more easily available, - methods to encourage your input include

(a) recording who has requested which guide
(b) making sure you know we have this information
(c) some reminder or even incentive system
(d) making it as easy as possible for you to input the information

I met up with Bill in Paris and by then, after travelling there by barge, I had become yet more convinced that the moorings guides should be the next major project for DBA utilising Information Technology. If you think about it we are the only organisation which could produce such a thing - we have the members who will write it. Sure there will still be paper maps and guides but none of them could ever be dynamically maintained by hundreds of barges, in real time.

The Google Earth sample is just a toe in the water to see what can be done. There may be other more suitable software down the line, although the collaborative aspect of Google Earth does seem well suited to it. Not to mention it's free! There are already Google Earth 'communities', at the moment they seem confined to ship wreck/aeroplane crash site spotters but that will change. In any case there are bandwidth issues for a while to come - none of us have mobile broadband yet. Finally ease of inputting the data will be crucial - the Google Earth beta and early versions were extremely easy and intuitive to use, worryingly the later versions have lost a little of this.

For the time being we will reproduce the old moorings guide web page and it will be placed in the 'members only' area of the new www.barges.org website. Hopefully we will be adding a recording system whereby the requestor's name, boat name, length, draft, date of request and guide(s) is recorded with a facility for Bill to produce a report on demand. We may also add an overview clickable map showing all the available guides and automate the distribution of the guides, allowing Bill to concentrate on eliciting feedback.

The best format for the guides from a database point of view is Excel which will make it smaller than the current Word/RTF format and enable us to easily convert it to any other database in future. We will also look at manually entering lat and long GPS coordinates. The guides will be available in web page (HTML) format to get round the problem of people not having Excel. Text only versions will be available for users on expensive mobile connections.

Longer term each of our guides could be stored as a 'KML' file and sent to members. Once you open it, assuming you have Google Earth, you can see (and fly) the path of a river/canal with all the moorings points showing up as clickable icons. We can even store photos of the moorings within the icons. You can also update it as you go, we would want a mechanism whereby updates are submitted to the editor for approval/cleaning up before being incorporated in the guide.  There is also the possibilityu to overlay waterwaps maps onto Google Earth, currently they have road overlays.  Lastly the guide could be connected to a GPS to show you your live position.  I have bid for a grant copy of the full 'Pro' version of Google Earth which Google offer free to US based charitable organisations at least.

If you are familiar with Google Earth you can download my sample KML file here. It will open Google Earth for you,  double click on the triangle of 3 blue dots in your left hand column called 'Paris downriver',  then click on 'tools' then 'play tour' to run it. It should look like the movies above (although you may need to cache some scenery). Please note the data in it is ficticious - don't try and moor or shop there. If you want to see the Eiffel tower in 3D switch on '3D buildings' in the 'layers' section.

Please send any feedback to me or the lists/newsgroups/forums.

David Beaumont
IT Director
DBA The Barge Association
www.barges.org