Zotero and Google Maps

I'm writing to learn more about Zotero's capabilities with Google maps. I would like to be able to show a citation from Zotero on a location on a map in Google maps. Is it possible to export citations from Zotero and have it be associated with a location/city name that would be recognized by Google maps? If so, how does the process work? If Zotero is not compatible with Google Maps, are there other mapping websites/softwares you would recommend that would work with Zotero?

Thanks in advance for your time and assistance.
  • You should take a look at the Zotero Maps plugin. It is a simple little tool that may do much of what you want.
  • edited March 14, 2010
    The version there is a bit out of date and won't be maintained any further. We've made a couple tweaks, and it'll be distributed from zotero.org going forward. (The extension id is different, so you'll need to manually uninstall the older version.)

    We've put up an XPI at http://zotero.org/download/plugins/zoteromaps-1.0.8.xpi

    The source code is at https://www.zotero.org/svn/plugins/zoteromaps/trunk/

    If someone wants to help with further development of the plugin, we'd be happy to accept patches and/or provide commit access.
  • Am I supposed to need to enter a Yahoo! App ID? I didn't need to in the previous release.
  • I'll let Sean comment, since I've never actually used this plugin, but I believe the App ID is optional (in which case clearly the UI needs work). An intern of ours made changes to the plugin last summer, and one of his changes was adding support for parsing unstructured attachment text using Yahoo! Placemaker. I'm guessing that if you don't enter an App ID it'll still work as it did previously.
  • The follow-up question being, if it's an app id, why isn't it hard-coded into the app? Not sure. We'll report back.
  • edited March 14, 2010
    It looks like you're right that I don't need it. It still works, even if the UI is pretty confusing. It used to just make a map-- now I need to select which fields to use and ignore the Yahoo App ID text box. If I end up using this on a regular basis, I'll look into patching it to clean up the UI and whatnot.
  • edited March 14, 2010
    Dan is right. The app ID is required for one key new feature that's only in the version of plugin available for download on zotero.org: mapping of item attachments (e.g PDFs). What the maps plugin does here is actually pretty cool: it takes all of the text from those attachments and sends it to the Yahoo PlaceMaker service for processing. This service automatically extracts location names from the text, and then the maps plugin plots those location entities.

    Because PlaceMaker requires an individual application ID (to prevent commercial abuse, I guess), the maps plugin also needs one to work.
  • After further consideration, I've gone ahead and hard-coded an application ID into the maps plugin. Only the checkboxes now remain. The source code has already been updated, and a new XPI will be available shortly.
  • It appears that the updated XPI was never posted. Could that be done?
  • Am I right that the Map plug in is out of service ? All the links I tried end in error messages.
    This would be a pity.
  • the new and developing PaperMachine plugin for Zotero does have a mapping function;
    https://github.com/chrisjr/papermachines
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