Introduction

Have you ever wondered what's in the other side of the world?

Maybe we, as in WE the Spanish and Kiwis, are lucky, because in the other side of the world, in the Antipodes there is another country. You know, almost 3/4 of the planet is water so...that is a very small probability of happeninOg!

So we decided to make a map, a map aimed to entice children to answer the question who is on the other side of the world, and if they like, give them the chance to get in touch with the people there, the antipodes.

We will love teachers in Spain and New Zealand to use this tool to teach a geography lesson to their students, and also to give them the opportunity of getting in touch with the school that they will find if they dig a tunnel through the center of the Earth.

On every Spanish school there are English courses and in some New Zealand schools there are Spanish courses, so let’s make not the distance, nor the language the excuse to get in contact with other curious people.

Enjoy the tool, and if you like it, please spread the word to everyone that could be interested, and if you can... Let us know!

Now the Technical Thing

The embryo of this project was an idea used in the Thesis Project "Finding our antipodes - A GIS application for educational purposes " presented by Carlos Galceran for the fulfilment of his MSc in GIS at UNIGIS-University of Girona in 2005. Carlos recently mentioned the idea to Peter and Peter to Xurxo and the rest is history…

We started this project with a bunch of data obtained from the registry of Educational Centers from New Zealand provided by Carlos and some schools from Galicia and Castilla y León in Spain obtained by Pedro. Later we found the public registry of Educational Centers from Spain, but the data was not in good shape so we had to do some webscrapping and database magic.

In the end we finished with two sets of data that we uploaded to CartoDB that can be freely obtained, and hopefully reused in other projects, from Vehrka's account

And then Xurxo made a little more of his usual (but still awesome) magic and worked out a solution for the webmap interface using (and learning to use) OpenLayers.

You can acces s the complete code in the repository (just following the Repo link in the menu bar)

And the rest of the history MUST be written by the users

Enjoy!..