What I'm doing - places of interest

One of the big efforts I'm making at the moment is to integrate all the POI data I've got into the database. What this involves is creating, and testing, rules that say what format the raw data files are in (in particular, some contain telephone information that can be parsed out using a regular expression) and how to convert them into entries in the place database. Having licensed the whole lot of data it seems silly not to use as much of it as possible.

But it's becoming obvious that for some areas it is starting to get a bit silly, and the map starts to vanish under the symbols. So I'm going to have to write an "option" selector that lets you chose which sorts of places you want showing (probably both at a "group" level - so you can exclude all historic sites for example, and at an individual level - so you can exclude a particular pub chain for example).

This won't be a particularly difficult piece of work, but it's fairly complicated, involving making changes to the data generation to automatically generate the configuration file - so that there is no reprogramming involved when new POI sets are added; writing code to generate the option file from the configuration file, and display it, and to load and save from a database somewhere; and to the gazetteer code to only show (both as maps and as text) places that you are interested in.

Should be a few week's work when fitted in along with everything else in life (a lot of next weekend will be lost to a beer festival!).