Venue Lexicon Kickoff

[bmann]

We just wrapped our call on geo data on AT Protocol https://smokesignal.events/did:plc:lehcqqkwzcwvjvw66uthu5oq/3lcgd3vggz72n

One of the take aways was to get specific here and see who wants to collaborate on a shared Lexicon around geo.

I know that Nosh Delivery was also looking at this.

One of the design goals would be to leverage the new Foursquare Open Source Places. I also have friends at Mapbox and other organizations that might want to participate.

The output of this would be a high quality Lexicon definition and supported tooling so that ATproto apps can use a shared Venue layer, and thus also aggregate content around Venues.

My personal interest is around Venue (business or POI), and I'd like to experiment with a "food spotting" type of record that uses it. This means roughly:

• name
• address (which is short for how to get there)
• notes on locating / getting in (e.g. buzz 301 and come to the third floor, in the food court next to the escalator)

Open questions for me:

• external identifier (eg foreign key to 4SQ places identifier)
• include lat/long or derive it?

This becomes part of a record -- e.g. a Smoke Signal Event or a Food Spotting Spot -- anything around a business claiming a record and having an associated profile with extra information I think would be a separate record / profile owned by that business.

Please leave a comment if this is interesting, especially with what your use case would be for a Venue lexicon.

[steveklabnik]

With the announcement of Foursquare shutting down (but not Swarm), I've been thinking heavily about wanting to mirror my Swarm data into my PDS.

However, this would end up being private data, not public, so would likely want to wait until that's solved first. But still interested in thinking about what would go in there.

I don't have any particular domain expertise in geo stuff, though, so I'm happy to participate but don't know how much insight I'll have.

[bmann]

Yeah, I'm focusing on public Venue info for this first Lexicon.