Mapping Hacks

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Chapter 9, Mapping with Other People

#95 Model Interactive Spaces

HACK

sites of interest were imported from the Open Guide to London; see “Set Up

an OpenGuide for Your Hometown”

[Hack #97] for details on how to simply

export and reuse the geodata in any Open Guide.

mudlondon has an Instant Message interface, using the Jabber protocol (see

http://jabber.org) to connect to different IM systems like AOL Instant Mes-

senger. To explore it, a person just talks to it; wandering around it is like

exploring a text adventure game: “You are on Charing Cross Road. You see

a Tube Station. You can walk to: Shaftesbury Avenue or Trafalgar Square.”

The rules for wandering around mudlondon are simple. To build a new

space, or connect to an old one, the user types “connect Placename.” If a

place named Placename is found in the model, it’s connected from the user’s

current location; if not, it is created, and the user is asked “What type of

place is this?” (e.g., Building, Park). The bot takes a decent stab at fitting the

new type into the spatial ontology and puts new types of places into a pool

for later examination by its human friends.

mudlondon was written partly as an answer to the “collaborative mapping”

problem; with no free sources of geo-encoded data, how can we build maps

for ourselves? How can we share our mental models of the world in a way

that is useful and can be built upon by others? Publishing ...