[Interop-dev] Any progress on AlterMap?

[Ralf Schlatterbeck]

On Tue, Oct 30, 2012 at 06:36:29AM -0300, Nicolás Echániz wrote:
> 
> Mitar, as I said in the email I just sent in reply to Federico, we are
> not proposing an "everybody can do whatever" approach. We believe that
> we can all agree on fundamental network data models that can be shared
> accross different projects while maintaining sufficient versatility to
> accommodate for more specific information on both the data and
> visualization aspects.

I also think this is a good idea. So lets try to define a common API
for community wireless networks (CWNs). There has been some previous
work already referenced by Mitar in another message.

Work on a common API was the "community network markup language",
history of which can still be found http://cnml.info
To my knowledge this has been picked up by at least one CWN, guifi.net,
in their CNML implementation:
http://en.wiki.guifi.net/wiki/CNML

In recent discussions it seems Athens
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athens_Wireless_Metropolitan_Network
has also an implementation of an XML representation.
Theo are you reading us?

> A schemaless master-master replicating data store like couchdb with a
> native RESTful HTTP API, could make all of this possible if properly
> combined with a versatile map and data visualization solution. We hope
> to be able to set this in motion and then see where it takes us...

I guess this is *one* solution, not everybody will want to go the road
of a schemaless data store as has been outlined by others.

But we *should* be able to come up with a common API -- first a
JSON representation. Maybe also an XML representation later on.
We have a first implementation of an API that I've outlined in another
message to this list. This has a query API, too, so maybe we can define
a query API (URL-schema), too.

It would be *way* kewl if a first application like the mapping app
could run against this API and work for different CWNs out there.

Other applications can follow. I'm thinking of
- Link planning:
  - Terrain
  - HF link modelling
- Monitoring
  - Config file generation
    - Smoke Ping
    - Nagios
    - ...
- ...

Many networks already have some of these applications. Maybe we can port
some to a new API. This would allow us to chose from different
implementations as some aspects may have better solutions in one network
while other aspects have a unique or better implementation in another
network.

Ralf
-- 
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