Anglonautes > English vocabulary / words > Earth > Geography

SAN FRANCISCO, July 26 — On the Web, anyone can be a mapmaker.

With the help of simple tools introduced by Internet companies recently, millions of people are trying their hand at cartography, drawing on digital maps and annotating them with text, images, sound and videos.

In the process, they are reshaping the world of mapmaking and collectively creating a new kind of atlas that is likely to be both richer and messier than any other.

They are also turning the Web into a medium where maps will play a more central role in how information is organized and found.

Already there are maps of biodiesel fueling stations in New England, yarn stores in Illinois and hydrofoils around the world. Many maps depict current events, including the detours around a collapsed Bay Area freeway and the path of two whales that swam up the Sacramento River delta in May.

James Lamb of Federal Way, Wash., created an online map to illustrate the spread of graffiti in his town and asked other residents to contribute to it. “Any time you can take data and represent it visually, you can start to recognize patterns and see where you need to put resources,” said Mr. Lamb, whose map now pinpoints, often with photographs, nearly 100 sites that have been vandalized.

Increasingly, people will be able to point their favorite mapping service to a specific location and discover many layers of information about it: its hotels and watering holes, its crime statistics and school rankings, its weather and environmental conditions, the recent news events and the history that have shaped it. A good portion of this information is being contributed by ordinary Web users.

In aggregate, these maps are similar to Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, in that they reflect the collective knowledge of millions of contributors.

“What is happening is the creation of this extremely detailed map of the world that is being created by all the people in the world,” said John V. Hanke, director of Google Maps and Google Earth. “The end result is that there will be a much richer description of the earth.”

This fast-growing GeoWeb, as industry insiders call it, is in part a byproduct of the Internet search wars involving Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and others. In the race to popularize their map services — and dominate the potentially lucrative market for local advertising on maps — these companies have created the tools that are allowing people with minimal technical skills to do what only professional mapmakers were able to do before.

“It is a revolution,” said Matthew H. Edney, director of the History of Cartography Project at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. “Now with all sorts of really very accessible, very straightforward tools, anybody can make maps. They can select data, they can add data, they can communicate it with others. It truly has moved the power of map production into a completely new arena.”

Online maps have provided driving directions and helped Web users find businesses for years. But the Web mapping revolution began in earnest two years ago, when leading Internet companies first allowed programmers to merge their maps with data from outside sources to make “mash-ups.” Since then, for example, more than 50,000 programmers have used Google Maps to create mash-ups for things like apartment rentals in San Francisco and the paths of airplanes in flight.

Yet that is nothing compared with the boom that is now under way. In April, Google unveiled a service called My Maps that makes it easy for users to create customized maps. Since then, users of the service have created more than four million maps of everything from where to find good cheap food in New York to summer festivals in Europe.

More than a million maps have been created with a service from Microsoft called Collections, and 40,000 with tools from Platial, a technology start-up. MotionBased, a Web site owned by Garmin, the navigation device maker, lets users upload data they record on the move with a Global Positioning System receiver. It has amassed more than 1.3 million maps of hikes, runs, mountain bike rides and other adventures.

On the Flickr photo-sharing service owned by Yahoo, users have “geotagged” more than 25 million pictures, providing location data that allows them to be viewed on a map or through 3-D visualization software like Google Earth.

The maps sketched by this new generation of cartographers range from the useful to the fanciful and from the simple to the elaborate. Their accuracy, as with much that is on the Web, cannot be taken for granted.

“Some people are potentially going to do really stupid things with these tools,” said Donald Cooke, chief scientist at Tele Atlas North America, a leading supplier of digital street maps. “But you can also go hiking with your G.P.S. unit, and you can create a more accurate depiction of a trail than on a U.S.G.S. map,” Mr. Cooke said, referring to the United States Geological Survey.

April Johnson, a Web developer from Nashville, has used a G.P.S. device to create dozens of maps, including many of endurance horse races — typically 25-to-50-mile treks through rural trails or parks.

“You can’t buy these maps, because no one has made them,” Ms. Johnson said.

Angie Fura used one of Ms. Johnson’s maps to help organize the Trace Tribute, an endurance ride on trails near Nashville, and distributed the map to dozens of other riders. “It gives riders an opportunity to understand what the race is like, and it allows them to condition their horses in accordance,” Ms. Fura said.

Until recently, most Web maps were separate islands that could be viewed only one at a time and were sometimes hard to find. But Google and Microsoft have developed tools that make it possible for multiple layers of data to be viewed on a single map. And Google is working to make it easier to search through all online maps.

Now, a tourist heading to, say, Maui can find the hotels and restaurants on the island and display them on a map that also superimposes photos from Flickr and users’ reviews of various beaches.

The same information is quickly moving from two-dimensional to three-dimensional renderings. Microsoft, for example, has created 3-D models of 100 cities worldwide and aims to have 500 models in the next year.

“You will have a digital replica of the world in true 3-D,” said Erik Jorgensen, general manager of Live Search at Microsoft.

For the Internet search companies, these efforts are part of a race to capture the expected advertising bonanza that will come as users browse through these maps in search of businesses and services.

In the process, they are creating technologies whose impact could be similar to those of desktop publishing software, which turned millions of computer users into publishers.

“The possibilities for doing amazing kinds of things, to tell stories or to help tell stories with maps, are just endless,” said Dan Gillmor, director of the Center for Citizen Media, a project affiliated with Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society and the journalism school at the University of California in Berkeley.

Some of Mr. Gillmor’s journalism students are working with a researcher at Dartmouth to add photographs, videos and interviews to a map-based project documenting the house-by-house reconstruction of a section of New Orleans. Mr. Gillmor wants local residents to contribute to the project, which uses Platial’s map service.

“The hope is that the community will tell the story of its own recovery with the map as the dashboard,” he said. “We have just seen the beginning of what people are going to do with this stuff.”

With Tools on Web, Amateurs Reshape Mapmaking,
NYT,
27.7.2007,
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/27/
technology/27maps.html

Small Ga. communities

fading off the map

Updated 12/19/2006
9:47 PM ET
USA Today
By Larry Copeland

DUE WEST, Ga. — The ladies at Due West Haircuts are having a fine time. Two stylists at the shop joke and carry on with two customers in the easy manner of longtime friends. "We're like the Steel Magnolias of Due West," says stylist Carol Campbell Hubbard, 52, who opened the shop in 1973.
It's just another day in Due West, where life seems to move at its own gentle pace. This community, unknown to most Atlantans, has no post office, no mayor, no police force. What it has is a sense of place, an awareness of its history and an identity stored in the memories of longtime residents.

For the hordes of newcomers moving into subdivisions springing up across metro Atlanta, Due West is just a handy name to identify this part of the large suburb of Marietta — as in Towne Square at Due West, the name of the new strip mall down the street from the haircut shop.

Due West is gone from the state's official map. So are Bill Arp, Egypt, Hickory Level, Yonkers, Roosterville, Texas and Hopeulikit, which sounds like it's spelled. In all, 488 communities across Georgia have been erased from the state Department of Transportation's map because they don't qualify as incorporated towns. Many have lost so much population there's no longer a there there. Others, including Due West, have simply been absorbed by sprawl.

The DOT says the map was getting so cluttered by place names it was becoming hard to read. Many of the erased communities were "placeholders," generally towns of 2,500 people or fewer. "Since about 1995, the biggest complaint about the map has been that you can't read them," state DOT spokeswoman Crystal Paulk-Buchanan says. "The words were so small people couldn't find anything."

Residents of some of the disappeared communities say this is another slight against the state's rural areas. "Our take is, yeah, the map is too cluttered in the Atlanta area, but it's not cluttered out in the rural areas," says Dennis Holt, president of the Hickory Level Community Association.

The brouhaha over Georgia's map highlights challenges faced by mapmakers around the nation. As the population shifts and rural areas lose people to metro areas or get absorbed by them, mapmakers have to race to keep up.

"I can understand where Georgia's coming from as far as trying to cut down on the clutter," says Shelley Snow, coordinator of Oregon's official state map. "The more clutter you get on there, the less effective the map can be. We're all facing that with the growth every state in the United States is seeing."

Map rules vary

Every map, it seems, has a story:

•Neighboring Alabama has not removed any unincorporated communities from its map in recent years, even one central Alabama town that no longer exists, state DOT spokesman Tony Harris says. In 1984, the town of Carrville in Tallapoosa County merged with the neighboring city of Tallassee. Harris says it remains on the state map as a reference point. "We haven't taken action about it still being on the map because we haven't been asked to, quite frankly," Tallassee Mayor Bobby Payne says.

•Iowa removed about 200 unincorporated towns in 1976 that did not have at least two of the following: a ZIP code; at least 25 people; a building on the National Register of Historic Places; an association with a state-managed recreation area; a retail business; an annual festival or celebration; or a school, church or cemetery. There was such an outcry that 197 were put back the next year, says Peggi Knight of the Iowa DOT. "That answers your question as to why we don't do that anymore," she says.

•In Arizona, place monikers stick indefinitely once they have been assigned by the State Board on Geographic and Historical Names, says board member Lloyd Clark, who says he's stunned that Georgia actually makes towns disappear. "I've never heard of that happening in Arizona," Clark says.

•Oregon towns must have a post office to be included, Snow says. State mapmakers also look at "the historical and geographic significance" of a place. A few years ago, Mount Angel, near Portland, was left off. Mount Angel, which gets a lot of visitors to its 117-year-old abbey, got back on: "They went and got themselves a post office, got their own ZIP code," Snow says.

•Ohio tries to include every incorporated city on the map and any village, town or area that has a post office, especially if it's on a state highway, spokeswoman Lindsay Komlanc says. "In our urban, congested areas, it becomes difficult to get every incorporated city on the map," Komlanc says.

Rand McNally, the nation's largest commercial mapmaker and producer of annual road atlases used by millions of motorists, uses different criteria than the states for its maps, chief cartographer Joel Minster says. "There are many towns that have very low populations, sometimes zero," he says. "We will tend to keep them on the map if they're known in the local area, if a place has a landmark, like a gas station or any type of specific building, or a water tower."

Lots of names in Georgia

Georgia loves its places. The state has 159 counties — second only to Texas, which has 254. That love of places means that mapmaking decisions have a ripple effect.

The public outcry over the left-off towns prompted the DOT to change its formula for inclusion on the map: The agency is adding new criteria for maps due out in June. Towns that have a post office will be restored. So will those with historic or economic importance. It's unclear whether that will help Hickory Level or Due West, which local lore says got its name because it lies due west of Marietta.

Sara Askins' family business, Due West Hardware, serves as the unofficial city hall, never mind that it has a Marietta address. The store's sign is a local landmark — hundreds of people have had their birthdays posted on it.

Askins says she has called this area Due West since she and her husband, George, opened the store in 1980. "It more than likely should be on the map," she says.

The ladies at Due West Haircuts feel even more strongly about Due West's identity. "I've never thought of this as Marietta," says stylist Ginger Jones, 50, who grew up here.

Hubbard adds, "I don't think it's the map that's too cluttered. I think it's the county that's too cluttered. Maybe if they leave us off the map, people won't be able to find us, and they'll quit moving out here."

Contributing: Mike Linn of the Montgomery (Ala.)

Advertiser, Ken Fuson of The Des Moines Register

and Dennis Wagner of The Arizona Republic

Small Ga. communities fading off the map,
UT,
19.12.2006,
https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-12-19-
small-towns_x.htm - broken link