Horizon2007:Shortlist 2d

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2007 Short Lists

Time-to-Adoption Horizon: One Year or Less

Time-to-Adoption Horizon: Two to Three Years

Time-to-Adoption Horizon: Four to Five Years

Key Trends

Critical Challenges

Time-to-Adoption: Two to Three Years

Mapping Goes Mainstream: It’s Not What You Know, It’s Where You Know

Our notion of maps has changed. An interesting convergence of technologies is bringing maps and data together in ways that are transforming our understanding of history, geography, societal and political change, and more. This set of technologies includes geolocation, the real-world location of a device connected to the Internet; geotagging, the practice of adding geographical metadata (latitude, longitude, altitude, and/or placenames) to images, websites, or other media; geographic information systems (GIS), which store and analyze vast amounts of geographically-referenced information; and data visualization. Maps are no longer static, flat things; they are dynamic, interactive tools that allow us to look at data from a geographical perspective.

Although the technologies themselves are not especially new, it is only recently that the opportunity to use and explore them has been made available to anyone with an Internet connection and a web browser. Previously, use of these systems required expensive software and specialized systems, but new applications have popularized location-based technologies and brought them into the mainstream. Geotagging lets us annotate maps with notes about our own experiences and memories of a place. Geolocation tools have become so ubiquitous that we are not even aware of them; we simply expect our cell phones to be able to direct us to nearby restaurants, to know what time zone we are in, and even to tell us if we have any friends or colleagues in the area. GPS enabled location devices are becoming standard features for navigation in our automobiles.

The emerging promise of these tools lies in the ability to connect them with real data. The application programming interface (API) of tools like Google Maps and Yahoo Maps allows other software programs to feed data to them, enabling customized information to be displayed on a map; for example, combining crime data and maps, or weather data and maps, allows users to visualize statistical data or data over time. Services like Mapbuilder take this process one step further, removing the need for software development skills and allowing users to plot their own data on maps via an easy-to-use web interface with no programming required. Mobile GMaps, a free service distributed under a Creative Commons license, brings searchable maps and satellite imagery to your cell phone.

Relevance for Teaching, Learning & Creative Expression

  • Create and annotate maps of trade routes, troop movements, or other historical events.
  • Map the progress of epidemics over time, combining statistical data with maps to show movement in space as well as time.
  • Geo-tag photos taken during fieldwork and link them to maps of the area.

Examples

For Further Reading

More resources tagged at http://del.icio.us/tag/hz07 -- If you have more, add or tag them in your own del.icio.us account with our official tag of hz07

Discussion

Add your thoughts, suggestions, examples to add here, and indicate who wrote it-- e.g. [Alan]

Discussion

2-3 years? This one seems off. There are some many end-user aimed mapping applications that allow you to create new maps that this seems like a reality already [Scott Leslie]

It's not whether the technology is a reality- the horizon means when educational institutios would be wildly adopting/using it. [Alan Levine]

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