Mapping Hacks

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Chapter 9, Mapping with Other People

#94 Geo-Warchalking with 2-D Barcodes

HACK

to the Wi-Fi markings based on symbols chalked by traveling hobos, mak-

ing the invisible visible.

Written symbols in the world are still hard to get in and out of an electronic

location system. You don’t really want to be typing in numbers to eight deci-

mal places, or triple-tapping postcodes. Human-understandable is not nec-

essarily machine-readable.

So how can we make reading and writing spatial annotations from hand-

held devices easy and automatic? Until RFID tags become available in spray

cans, anyone can sticker the city...with barcodes.

Big in Japan

Especially in Japan, many modern mobile phones read 2-D barcodes, in a

standard format, using the on-phone camera. These barcodes include a

phone number and a URL or email address. These barcodes have infiltrated

the business world. People print them on their paper business cards, and

advertisements often have a barcode link.

But we want to store other data. We want latitude and longitude. We want

places. We want lots of things: we want to barcode tables, chairs, every-

thing! How can we create all these specifications to describe all these things?

Many of them exist already, in the form of RDF schemas. “Model Interac-

tive Spaces”

[Hack #95] outlines some of the basic options for describing

spaces, and things that relate to them, in RDF. There are schemas, or