https://OpenBenches.org/ - an open data repository for memorial benches.

OMG! This code is still a bit horrible. Looking at it will make you a bit sad. This is a slightly grubby beta - thrown together to test whether things work, but now we are sharing the blame with all the folks who have contributed so far.

All contributions are welcome. Before making a pull request, please:

1. Raise a new issue describing the problem and how you intend to fix it.
2. Submit a Pull Request referencing the Issue.

You can get all the data, or partial data, from the API. Data is returned in geoJSON format.

• All Data
  • https://openbenches.org/data.json/
• Specific Bench
  • https://openbenches.org/data.json/?bench=123
  • That last / is required.
• Geographic Area (Haversine)
  • https://openbenches.org/data.json/?latitude=51.234&longitude=-1.234&radius=20
  • latitude and longitude in WGS 84.
  • radius in Kilometres.
  • A maximum of 20 results are returned.
  • That last / is required.
• Formats
  • By default, the JSON starts with var benches =
  • To get pure JSON, append format=raw
  • https://openbenches.org/data.json/?bench=123&format=raw
• Images
  • The API doesn't return images. Yet.

This is a simple PHP and MySQL website. No need for node, complicated deploys, or spinning up containerised virtual machines in the cloud.

• PHP 7 or greater.
• MySQL 5.5 or greater with innodb.
• ImageMagick 6.9.4-10 or greater.

You will need to sign up to some external API providers:

• Reverse Geocoding requires an OpenCage API key
• Flickr Import requires a Flickr API key
• Tweeting requires a Twitter Developer API key

Add them to config.php.example - rename that to config.php

In the /database/ folder you'll find a sample database. All text fields are utf8mb4_unicode_ci because we live in the future now.

Hopefully, the tables are self explanatory:

• benchID
• latitude
• longitude
• address text representation generated by reverse geocoding. For example "10 Downing Street, London SW1A 2AA, United Kingdom"
• inscription
• description placeholder. Might be used for comments about the bench.
• present placeholder. If a bench has been physically removed, this can be set to false.
• published
• added datetime
• userID foreign key

Originally we were going to force people to sign in with Twitter / Facebook / GitHub. But that discourages use - so users are now pseudo-anonymous. Hence this weird structure!

• userID
• provider could be Twitter, GitHub, etc.
• providerID user's name on the provider's service. Anonymous users stores their IP address.
• name their display name. Anonymous users stores the time they added a bench.

We store the original image - smaller images are rendered dynamically.

Media storage can be complicated. Storing thousands of images in a single directory can cause problems on some systems. To get around this, we calculate the SHA1 hash of each image. The image is stored in a subdirectory based on the hash. For example, if the hash is 1A2B3C, the file will be stored in /photos/1/A/1A2B3C.jpg

• mediaID
• benchID
• userID
• sha1 A hash of the file.
• importURL If the image was imported from an external source - like Flickr.
• licence The default is CC BY-SA 4.0, imported images may be different.
• media_type We allow different types of photo - in the future, we might have other types of media.

At the moment, we only accept photos - of the inscription, the bench, the view from the bench, a panorama, and a VR photosphere.

• shortName Internal ID.
• longName Displayed to the user.
• displayOrder When rendering a form in HTML, this determines the order they are presented in.

• shortName Internal ID.
• longName Displayed to the user.
• url For more information.

Everything we do builds on someone else's hard work.

• OpenBenches data are made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0).
• The code powering the website is MIT.
• All photos uploaded by users are CC BY-SA 4.0.
• Benches from Bath are OGL and Powered by Bath: Hacked.
• Logo template by Creative Mania CC BY.
• Twitter integration by CodeBird GPL v3.
• Maps by Leaflet BSD 2-clause "Simplified" License.
• Cluster library by Leaflet MIT.
• Map tiles by MapBox.
• GPS logo by Chinnaking CC BY.
• Panoramic Visualiser by Pannellum MIT.
• JavaScript EXIF reader & image preview by JavaScript Load Image MIT.