Comment by ml-

19 hours ago

Started work on a project to put local history on a map. If I go somewhere I would ideally want to just open this webapp and immediately get presented with cool or interesting history that happened close by.

Maybe it's a story about named local fishermen from the early 1900s, with pictures, the history of a statue and videos of the process, or the state of a graffiti wall over time.

Currently in a phase of UI development and testing, and historical societies outreach for collaboration. It might stall and just fizzle into nothing, or it might be something cool.

Also still doing https://wheretodrink.beer, but haven't added anything of note since playing on this other project.

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ml-

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atourgates  18 hours ago

Ever since I discovered Gypspy nearly a decade ago (now Guidealong https://guidealong.com/) - I've been dreaming of an open source app that'd pull local history from sources like Wikipedia, those roadside historical signs, etc., and narrate as you drive.

https://autio.com/ is similar - but obviously not open source, and more limited.

It seems like it could even tailor itself to what an individual user is interested in, and with AI - could turn more "dry" encyclopedia-type information into more compelling narratives. With some kind of route planning software, you could even pre-plan your trips ahead of time and select the things you're interested in.

Obviously not what you're building, but something related that's been clunking around in the back of my head for a while.

  • ml-  17 hours ago

    Yeah, that's cool. Currently tangential, but conceptually not something that would be completely out of scope in the end. I'm planning to use machine translations, text-to-speech, and multi modal generative models for accessibility already. There's also an idea for baking in GPS audio tours. Obviously depends on sourcing some quality content first

    When you say open source is it so you could self host it, use your "own" models, and curate your own datasets? or some other reasons? I could see a future where a lot of the project could potentially be open sourced and work with any defined geojson API.

    • atourgates  14 hours ago

      Open source was the wrong term (though that would be fine).

      I meant community-sourced. Some kind of community where local "experts" or history enthusiasts could contribute info.

      AKA - invite a local or regional historical society to contribute data for their region, with the benefit that they could then easily generate a regional tour map/route/recommendation.

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