(via The Secret Life of Cats: What You Can Learn by Putting a GPS on Your Kitty - Alexis C. Madrigal - The Atlantic) OK, I want to do this now too
The Zoological Society of London (ZSL) has launched an initiative to collect data about the cats of London into a map. It’s called, perhaps unsurprisingly, Cat Map.
Cat Map invites mog owners or acquaintances to plot their feline counterparts onto a mapping tool, uploading a photo, an address, the cat’s name, colour and age as well as a description
Mapathon 2013 — which starts on February 12 and culminates on March 25, 2013 — is an India-wide mapping contest open to just about anybody who lives in India. We’re inviting Google Maps users from all over the country to help us create better maps for India by adding knowledge of their neighborhoods through Google Map Maker
If you look at a map and if I look at a map, should it always be the same for you and me? I’m not sure about that, because I go to different places than you do.
This is lovely: A birdhouse inspired by Google Maps tells birds where home is.
The Swiss Federal Office of Topography has published a complete set of digitized historical maps from 1938 to 2011. The twist: a browser application allows you to create a time travel movie at any place in Switzerland for any zoom level. As an example, you can see the recession of Europe’s biggest glacier over the last 75 years
there will be a new literature from the mapping dictionary that’s now being built. There’s an Android app we’ve released called Field Trip…
Then when you’re walking around, say in Washington, D.C., the phone will buzz and say, “You are 25 feet from an accurate map of 2,700 solar objects. If you go over there to the Einstein Memorial, you can see them.” Or you might be walking down the street and it will beep and say… “Around the corner behind you is where a scene from your favorite movie was filmed.” It is using your location to search in a database of “interesting things,” and it learns what kinds of things you care about. It means having your life enlightened by travel knowledge, every-where, or getting to walk around with local experts who know your tastes, wherever in the world you go.
The major change in mapping in the past decade, as opposed to in the previous 6,000 to 10,000 years, is that mapping has become personal.
… a map has gone from a static, stylized portrait of the Earth to a dynamic, inter-active conversation about your use of the Earth
In 2008, it could take six to 18 months for Google to update a map. The company would have to go back to the firm that provided its map information and get them to check the error, correct it and send it back. “At that point we decided we wanted to bring that information in house,” says McClendon. Google now updates its maps hundreds of times a day. Anyone can correct errors with roads signs or add missing roads and other details; Google double checks and relies on other users to spot mistakes.
Thousands of people use Google’s Map Maker daily to recreate their world online, says Michael Weiss-Malik, engineering director at Google Maps. “We have some Pakistanis living in the UK who have basically built the whole map,” he says. Using aerial shots and local information, people have created the most detailed, and certainly most up-to-date, maps of cities like Karachi that have probably ever existed.
Turning Street View Into Street Art
As Google’s Street View cars rumble through our cities and towns, they don’t capture merely the geography of our streets and buildings. They see and record the life there, people going about their days.
Those inadvertent portraits are now moving back from the digital realm to our earthly one, in artist Paolo Cirio’s projectStreet Ghosts.
Cirio finds images of humans on the streets of Street View and creates life-sized prints of them, and places them back on the spot where they were originally captured, such as in the picture above, taken from a Street View image of Dircksenstrasse in Berlin.”
Bruhat Bangalore Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) …will use Google Maps to aid garbage collection.
Under a pilot project that will be launched on October 1, pourakarmikas will collect garbage from designated routes at allotted timings every day.
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“Using the maps, lanes/ streets with 100 to 125 houses will be selected, which will be identified as a single block. Each block will be managed by one pourakarmika… each pourakarmika will be given a pushcart which will have three bins, coluredblue, green and black. Dry waste, wet waste and rejected waste like sanitary waste will be collected in these bins respectively. After collecting the garbage, pourakarmikas will assemble at a designated place at the time allotted to them. Two autos for wet and dry waste will collect the waste from pourakarmikas
Geographic information systems represent a jump from paper maps like the abacus to the computer. “I honestly think we’re seeing a more profound change, for map-making, than the switch from manuscript to print in the Renaissance,” University of London cartographic historian Jerry Brotton told the Sydney Morning Herald. “That was huge. But this is bigger.”
The maps we used to keep folded in our glove compartments were a collection of lines and shapes that we overlaid with human intelligence. Now, as we’ve seen, a map is a collection of lines and shapes with Nick Volmar’s (and hundreds of others’) intelligence encoded within.
the maps team, largely driven by Street View, is publishing more imagery data every two weeks than Google possessed total in 2006
Blockee… helps you pimp your street with “civic bling” – or, at least, begin to imagine what that might look like… Code for America have created the game… the app pulls in images of your block from Google Street View, then arms you with twinkling icons to reimagine these familiar spaces, with more trees or bike lanes or public benches.
Visual data mining of Google Streetview images to determine the unique architectural “style” of a city bit.ly/N0fmNe’s-unique-style/
