[Ssc-dev] Fwd: [ODK Developers] Feedback on ODK-Collect modification that collects GPS traces

[Nathan of Guardian]

Some interesting overlap betwen ODK and InformaCam.

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [ODK Developers] Feedback on ODK-Collect modification that
collects GPS traces
Date: Fri, 10 Feb 2012 13:51:34 -0800 (PST)
From: prabhas.pokharel at gmail.com
Reply-To: opendatakit-developers at googlegroups.com
To: opendatakit-developers at googlegroups.com
CC: aostiles at stanford.edu

Hi all,
Based on a request from Columbia University Earth Institute and Africa
Soil Information Service, Andrew Stiles and others from Stanford have
developed a version of ODK-Collect with GPS tracing functionality
(derived from the Distance and Area Measurement Application available in
the Android market, and parts of which were graciously open sourced).
They began during a one-day hackathon in November, and have put in
countless hours since... thanks to Andrew in particular for the hard work!

The code is available here:
https://bitbucket.org/aostiles/odk-collect-afsis

I wanted to ask a few things to the odk developers as we go forward:
- Is there interest in pulling this back into core? We'd certainly be
fans if that was done, and would be interested in hearing what it would
involve. (for example, we are wondering whether we should pull the
activity itself out of ODK entirely?)
- It involved the modification of javarosa-core to add a new "gps_trace"
type. ODK understands that type, and forwards to the
GPSTraceWidget/GPSTraceActivity that we wrote to get the data. We then
save a string of the form
KML_FILENAME LENGTH_DOUBLE AREA_DOUBLE
into the submission xml, and we put the KML file in the appropriate
folder (ie, wherever the media files go).  Comments if anything seems
off here would be welcome.
- If it was the right thing to do, is there interest in pulling this up
into javarosa? We'd love especially for this to happen as then we
wouldn't have to maintain our own set of tools that understand gps_trace.
- Our next steps will be put support for this on formhub and xlsforms...
I'm guessing that means rolling those tools with the modified javarosa
core and making gps_trace understandable on xlsforms. Do any of you see
anything else here?

Thanks a lot. We are a bit new to this, so suggestions and feedback welcome.