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The BNA-BBOT soundmap - bna-bbot.be/soundmap - is a collaborative website where visitors can listen and contribute to a database of geolocated sounds, recorded in Brussels. The previous version of the website was made in 2011 by La Villa Hermosa. Since then more than 800 sounds have been uploaded, from street protests to birds, fountains, machines, trafic, road works, bells.

The old website was running on a custom CMS that was slowly becoming obsolete and the public interface was based on Google Maps, with an extensive use of its API to find coordinates based on an address (geocoding) or to find an address based on its coordinates (reverse-geocoding), to find routes between two points (directions) and to display and draw on the map.

The first thing we did was to integrate all the soundmap data to the BNA-BBOT database that contains already all the testimonies they have been archiving since 2000 (if you do not know their work : please go to bna-bbot.be/en/database/ where you will have access to more than 19000 testimonies from people working / living in Brussels), with a new data structure.

Then, we rebuilt entirely the public interface with an important shift : it doesn't need any external API to work anymore. No more Google Maps API for the data, the tiles, the directions, the geocoding; no MapBox, MapTiler, Radar,... everything is hosted and served on the BNA-BBOT server, with OSM, TileServer, Nominatim, OSRM and MapLibre GL JS.

What it means for BNA-BBOT is that there is no dependencies to external servers anymore for the soundmap to work and they also have a tool that could be useful for other maps of Brussels.

We developped several new ways of browsing the sounds on the map. There is now three types of filters; by years, by people, by keyword, and a free search field. Additionnaly, there is a new way of "curating the sounds" for the BNA-BBOT team: they can now create what we call "walks", which are sounds selections around a topic. They can be viewed as geolocated playlists, with paths drawn on the map between each sound.