Mapping Hacks

Node Runner #93

Chapter 9, Mapping with Other People

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HACK

Parts of this chapter are forward-looking, to a future of pervasive computing

in which you’re tapping out your latest photomoblog to your freak-clique

with your data glove on the low-slung table in your favorite recaf-vending

geoloc. But we’d also like to look backward, to document civic history and

the changing use of space, and tell the stories of our wagon-riding great-

grandparents in a medium that our electrolobed gargoyle great-grandchil-

dren will be able to connect with.

The semantic web—a network of machine-understandable, interconnected

information sources that complements the existing web of human-readable

pages—is our current best hope for creating media annotated with location

and time. Many of these hacks use the Resource Description Framework

(RDF) graph model and XML format to attempt to bridge between the Web

as we know it and the all-singing, all-dancing geospatial web of the hopeful

future.

The possibilities inherent in open source GIS, and freely available data with

a spatial component, are as endless as all our collective imaginations. The

software and the data standards described here allow us to describe our

neighborhood, exchange models of our environment and how we might

willfully or unwillingly change it, and stitch these models together in a “geo-

scope.” Geofiction blurs with geofact, in ways that we can’t yet ...