New Scientist has an article about people using GPS devices to create their own maps. According to the article the rationale - it least in Europe - is the price of otherwise available maps. To save a couple of pennies (Euro) the people behind the trend spend hour upon hour traversing the local network of streets to produce the homemade maps.
I have to admit that I am among the apparently few who haven't become addicted to flick, so perhaps I have a problem when it comes innovative ways of spending time, but the mapping activity ranks among the most foolish things I have heard recently. Perhaps a few Scotsmen would go (walk) this far to save money, but still...
That was at least my immediate reaction until my eyes caught up with the fact that the article featured IFTF describing the trend as the beginning of a geospatial web. With the IFTF "endorsement" I felt I had to give the idea a second chance.
It didn't make much more sense on second thought either, there has to be simpler ways to put the local coffee bar on a map, but then movies such as "Sliding Doors", "Short cuts" and "Magnolia" came to my mind. Imagine if we all gave up some of our right to privacy and produced and shared dynamical private maps. Not just maps of the local neighbourhood, but maps containing information about when we had been where. Pretty straightforward. It would no longer be left to Hollywood to speculate in what would have happened, if I had taken another route to the office this morning - or if I had been 10 minutes late. On the map sharing server (Mapr?) some pattern recognition routine would allow me to see, who I would have met in that case. It would even be possible to perform match making among persons travelling in my foot steps but at different times. People I may otherwise never have met would suddenly leave anonymity. As in the movies our lifes would begin to converge.
In this case I think that I would buy myself a GPS, opening the door to a fascinating kind of parallel worlds. But my map of London would still be the one I can get free of charge at the airport.
There are sweeping ramifications for Global aid & development, as well as for the facilitation of the accountability/transparency wave for governments, for-profit and nonprofit/ngo institutions. Imagine the citizen-based effort of combining GPS/GIS with a Benetech/MARTUS-like disaggregated & encrypted realtime mapp of citizen-reported human trafficking activities. Soon, there will be nowhere to hide. What follows after that is citizen-based "follow-the-money" maps (not yet linked with GPS/GIS, but already nascent on several collective-research wiki sites); citizen-based epidemiology reports, etc.
A recent Tech museum laureate organization used GPS/GIS to map areas of high radioactivity on their Indian reservation. Suddenly, the military & USG have no leg to stand on when confronted with the issue.
Posted by: Peter Tavernise | March 23, 2005 at 10:31 AM
As followup, a few URLs:
http://www.globalmapaid.rdvp.org/
http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/index.jsp
http://www.martus.org/
Best,
P.
Posted by: Peter Tavernise | March 23, 2005 at 10:34 AM
Sorry, that's:
http://globalmapaid.rdvp.org/
Posted by: Peter Tavernise | March 23, 2005 at 10:36 AM
Last one:
http://www.techawards.org/laur_stories_results.cfm?id=102
Posted by: Peter Tavernise | March 23, 2005 at 10:41 AM
See also: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2005/02/28.html#a1186 Jon Udell constructs walking tour with Google Maps, with details. Fascinating, but more about specialty applications rather than constructing whole maps.
Posted by: Franz | March 23, 2005 at 10:58 AM
Maps of London are not an end unto themselves, at all, but rather creation of a new open source digital base layer for a spectrum of new location based services, that otherwise could not be created without a license from the Ordinance Survey the official U.K. mapping agency. Imagine how people would feel if they had to pay a fee and ask permisssion from the US government to launch a simple web page. That's whqat the situation is in the U.K. and other European countries, street maps are the intellectual property of the government that have to be licensed to be re-used.
Posted by: Mike Liebhold | March 24, 2005 at 01:36 PM
Unlike the free-of-charge city maps at the London airport, the New Scientist article isn't free so I didn't read it. I suppose that the following are examples of what the article mentions:
http://www.gpsdrawing.com/
http://www.gpsdrawing.com/gallery.htm
My take is, if you've got a GPS receiver, you won't be wasting any time if you just turn it on as you mill about during the day. You can avoid privacy poblems by turning it off at will.
Then, when you superimpose your own maps over many days, weeks or months, you might learn alot about your own habits ... and then change them.
I suppose you could also annotate your maps and turn them into a tourist application ... a kind of "neighbourhood guide" for others to enjoy:
http://www.pdpal.com/
Over the summer months in Paris we get between 5,000 and 15,000 rollerbladers for weekly rides through the city on Friday nights and on Sunday afternoons. Each week the ride is different ... it might be neat to see the GPS maps of those rides, as a permanent record of the event.
Or, DisneyWorld could give kids their map of the day they spent at the park.
Indeed, I don't think we need to look for "usefulness" in everything we do. GPSdrawing could be just about people making their own art. Or maybe about people recording their Sunday walk with their family.
I think there's more here than meets the eye at first.
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