[Developers] new cool acre app

[Shawn Simister]

Daniel O'Connor wrote:
>
>
> On Mon, May 25, 2009 at 4:55 AM, Shawn Simister <narphorium at gmail.com 
> <mailto:narphorium at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     I went ahead and mocked-up a sample interface
>     <http://locator.freebaseapps.com/index/en/lord_elgin_hotel> using
>     Placemaker. To be honest, I'm not that impressed with the results
>     that it's been giving me so far. There are a lot of obvious errors
>     and it refuses to pick up basic street addresses. I think I might
>     need to switch it over to Calais to to get better results.
>
>
> Oh that UI is awesome.
> I don't suppose you could run it through all three (Placemaker, 
> Calais, Zemanta), or give the user a choice of engines?
>
> Only nitpicks:
> If I grab something, drag it, and it's on a word boundry, the thing 
> gets extracted from the leftmost, so the offset is wrong.
>
> IE
> One two three (city
> name) four five
>
> Grabbing city name uses the left position of "name". Annoying. FF 3.5b4.
>
> Perhaps if you made that so it was display: inline-block or something.
>
I'm not sure if running the text through all three services would 
actually improve the results or just add more noise. It would also take 
a lot of work to merge all the results in a meaningful way. Instead, 
I've re-worked the example from yesterday so that it uses Calais instead 
of Placemaker and the results are noticeable better 
<http://locator.freebaseapps.com/>. Apparently, Calais doesn't handle 
street addresses either but it was pretty straightforward to add that in 
by myself using regular expressions.

An interesting side-effect of switching to Calais is that the city 
entities that it returns also list which state/province and country they 
are contained by. This means that it should be possible to setup the UI 
so that if you drag "Ottawa" into the city field it would automatically 
populate the province and country fields for you.

Thanks for picking up that bug with the drag & drop. I made the 
locations display as inline-block and it fixed the problem. With the new 
layout and improved location detection you can't see the bug anymore but 
at least I don't have to worry about it popping up in other topics.

Shawn
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.freebase.com/pipermail/developers/attachments/20090525/cbe4cc74/attachment-0001.htm