About Tagzania




What is this?

Tagzania is about tags and places. If you register and log in, you can add places, points, to create and document your maps. When you add a point, you may tag it with keywords. That way, Tagzania is not only a place to build and keep your own maps, shared territories are created as well.

Examples:

News and interaction

Join the Tagzania mailing-list to interact in the conversation between users and developers. More info here. Some users and promoters of Tagzania have achieved diplomatic status due to their contributions. You can be one of them!

We have a blog also, and these are the latest headlines from it:

We have a Twitter account as well, if you want to follow us from there.


Bookmarklets

While navigating in certain mapping sites (Google Maps, MSN Virtual Earth, Multimap...), you can click on the specific bookmarklet and save the location you are viewing in your Tagzania account. Bookmarklets work only for registered users. More info.

GeoRSS

Subscribe to our RSS feeds, which are of a special nature: they are truly GeoRSS feeds, that will display normally in any newsreader, but also have geographic information encoded, so they can be used in several ways. That's the way we syndicate content, putting it into the open. All user and tag pages at Tagzania have RSS. You can subscribe to see what each user adds, under every tag at use. Our GeoRSS feeds follow the model proposed by the W3C Semantic Web Interest Group, which is one of the accepted flavors of GeoRSS.

KML

KML, or Keyhole Markup Language, is an XML grammar and file format for modeling and storing geographic features for display in the Google Earth Client. Like HTML, KML has a tag-based structure with names and attributes used for specific display purposes. Thus, the Google Earth viewer acts as a browser of KML files. In order to export your data from Tagzania to Google Earth, just save the KML file and open it in Google Earth.

Clik here to learn more about Google Earth and other 3D environements where you can visualize data bookmarked at Tagzania

Searching

The search function in Tagzania gives results from the items tagged at our database. Registered users see their own results first, and then those from all locations tagged.

Moreover, a database of world placenames is searched as well. This is based in a web service set up by Geonames.org. Learn more here.

The posting interface also lets you search for postal addresses in several countries. Learn more about address search here. Address search also works when posting routes, when you search for the initial point of a given route.

Firefox search plugin: Do you use Firefox to surf the web? Give the Tagzania search plugin for Firefox a try.

URL construction

Pages with search results have clear URLs like www.tagzania.com/search/carnival. You can use that model to provide direct and easy links to Tagzania searches, constructing URLs. There are more ways find places in Tagzania with URL constructions: using tag combinations.

Tags and usernames can be combined with single locations to show proximity calculations, as well. For instance, this is an item in Rome, surrounded by the closest locations added around: www.tagzania.com/item/7326. Now let's perform some tricks on that URL:

So far, no user+tag or tag+tag combinations work on these proximity calculations, but that will come. Meanwhile, plenty of options to play.

Besides, URLs can be constructed that reveal what locations are have been tagged around any place in the world. These URLs have the following logic: www.tagzania.com/near/lat/lon/ with latitude and longitude given in decimal numbers. For instance:

Internationalization / Language versions

Tagzania begun in July 2005 as a website only available in English. But in February 2006, it was re-organised as a multilingual service, with additional language versions: Basque, Spanish and Polish, to begin with. You can choose the language of your choice at the settings page.

Are you interested in seeing Tagzania in your language? You can contribute with translations. Please contact through the mailing list.

The people and software behind

Tagzania has been created by CodeSyntax, a company located in the Basque Country, and member of the ZEA Partners consortium.

This website makes use of the following APIs: Google Maps API, Geonames web services and the Flickr API.

Powered by free software: Python, Zope, MySQL, GPSBabel.

Open content

We assume that you don't upload copyrighted material in descriptions. Following that, we consider the description and location of places submitted to Tagzania to be open content (Creative Commons ShareAlike). The geographical and textual information contained here can be reused elsewhere, but it cannot become copyrighted material.