BBC Open Learning

Help Yourself

Prototype : BBC News Globe

Description

This prototype was created in Flash. It reads an RSS feed from BBC news and then plots points on the globe each time it comes across a place name in one of the stories. It could be adapted to read any RSS feed.

Above you can see the following two rss feeds from the BBC. You can see a full screen version here.

World News Homepage (shown with the red markers)
http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_uk_edition/world/rss.xml

Sport Homepage (shown with the red markers)
http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/sportonline_uk_edition/front_page/rss.xml

Rolling over the markers on the map will show you more details about the story that references that location. Clicking on the marker will take you to the news story itself.

How it works

Flash loads and then parses regular rss feeds from the BBC news and sport sites.

The contents of the 'title' tags in the rss xml are then sent off to Yahoo's geocoding API

If any place names are recognised by Yahoo it sends back the longitude and latitude co-ordinates (it often gets confused and you'll find lots of mistakes, usually placed in North America).

Meanwhile a rotating globe with moon was created using the Alpha version of Papervision 3D.

An algorithm takes the Cartesian co-ordinates returned by Yahoo and converts them into spherical co-ordinates and it's then easy to use Papervision 3D to plot a marker on the correct spot on the map.

The Tweener class is used to animate the world when you click and drag with you mouse.

What open source stuff does it use?

This prototype actually uses a mixture of open source and commercial stuff

Open Source

• Papervision 3d
• The Tweener Class for Flash
• Yahoo Local API

Commercial

• Flash Authoring Tool
• AS3 tool tip component
• The planetpixelemporium who created the map

Note: Most of the code for this project was adapted from Mark Waters' excellent article on Geocoding in Flash.

How could it be used in the classroom?

It would be relatively easy to adapt the code for this project to create any number of applications.

Anything that mentions places could be visualised on a map of the world.

• Set texts for English GCSE and A-Level could be visualised to show what places were referenced in them.
• It could be deconstructed and used in a Maths lesson to demonstrate a practical use of Trigonometary.
• Or used in a Georaphy lesson to show the relationship between catesian and sperical co-ordinates.

Where to go from here

This prototype was created by Andrew Littledale. You can download the sourcecode from his website (at your own risk - please read the terms and conditions).

For Flash tutorials visit www.gotoandlearn.com.