Making Annotated Maps and the Missing Aggregator

Engadget shows the level of popular participation mapping has reached. It has posted DIY instructions for creating annotated Google Maps, a pastime that is becoming increasingly widespread as leading edge technology users and even fast followers get more comfortable with linking different bits of information together to illustrate their world. For those users who can navigate a few editing programs and, more importantly, capture key visual and informational information about their area, creating an annotated Google map requires just a little time and attention.

One question is does raise is, what is the outcome of the hundreds if not thousands of consumer-driven creations of annotated maps and mashups already underway, like those enabled by applications such as Platial Maps, for example? What is emerging from the rising mashup/mapping mania is a million standalone maps of personal or niche community interest, with little if any aggregation to a larger mapping system -- "metamaps" if you will.

Is this a bad thing? Not yet, since we are in a largely positive phase of user-created relational geography. At the moment, however, it is like entering a disorganized bookstore with thousands of different travel guides to roughly the same area. What's lacking is a layer that allows users to choose first what view of the world they want to see, then what area, then perhaps based on expertise of the mapper - a mix of Google and eBay for user created geographic information. Anyone got a few million dollars to start this thing?

Update on March 12, 2006 by Scott Smith

Jason from Platial asks some additional questions about the issue of aggregation of user-created annotated maps. Those questions about the nature of such an aggregation framework include:

• What would it look like?
• Who would join and who would refuse?
• What atomic bits would need to be included?
• How is it related to the ongoing geodata standards conversations?
• But most of all, what would be the simplest, fastest, cheapest way to get it up and running?

Provide your opinions here, or at Neogeography.

Comments

[Giles Lane]

Scott,

In some ways what you're describing relates to our Urban Tapestries (http://research.urbantapestries.net) project and our ongoing research programme Social Tapestries (http://socialtapestries.net). We're a few weeks away from completing version 2 of the Urban Tapestries platform, which is designed to enable visualisations of the *relationships* between places and the themes that link them -- all based on our concept of *public authoring*, or knowledge mapping and sharing. Its much more than just putting virtual pins in online maps, its about how people articulate complex social and cultural (as well as political and economic) relationships and how/where they anchor them in local contexts and situations.

best,
Giles
http://urbantapestries.net/weblog/

[R.]

One new site that relates to this idea is flagr.com, which combines Google Maps with user tagging of locations (a bit like del.icio.us for the physical world). Users can associate a title, description, set of tags, and photos with a location, and can add other users as friends (an undercurrent of social networking). One can view and search one's own tags, one's friend's tags, or the site's entire collection. Since flagr is still in beta, there are still some bugs.

[jason wilson]

yes yes, the bookstore analogy is a good one, but also add to it that the bookstore is full or various vendors, each squatting in one corner of the shop, trying to lure the 'right' kinds of people over to its table. it's a classic problem involving the value of the middlemen. the end user wants the info, the publishers all package the same data for slightly different tastes, the book selling tables offer certain (overlapping) collections of these books, again based perhaps on taste (target market). the 'consumer' either feels like this is a bug or a feature of the sytem.

of course, the creators of this data (in most cases) would be interested in it getting out into the most accessible place, onto the most sites, in front of most people who care. http://evdb.com has a really interesting position on the ownership of data, and the distribution of data, and in fact the basic premise of competition. the work in a split environment, where the data is openly pushed and pulled from multitudes of sources, including the users, then, they have their own front end consumption interface http://eventful.com which is basically an aggregator of events. everyone keeps talking about breaking the walls down around the data garden, and brian dear is actually doing it.
One strange part about their setup is just that the open DB and the aggregator service are the same thing.


Along these lines, a few of us geo families have been getting together to talk about an open db for placedata, enabling not just one interface to the data, but a rich multitude of potentials. the analogy then becomes your own local bookstore, with it's own disctintive charm and flavor, but with access to absolutely any travel book, and even the ability just make custom travel book mashups according to your needs, desires and culture. We'll be talking a lot more about this project at http://platial.typepad.com soon, tune in, and speak up.