Monday 10 September 2012

We're all in deep map now

A few thoughts on the Atlantic article on GooMaps...

  • I love the term "the deep map".  I'm not doing GIS any more - I'm doing deep mapping!
  • Yay!  Geospatial conflation gets a mention in the MSM!
  • The article name-checks Borge's map.  The original story pointed out the paradox of a 1:1 scale map - but this is only paradoxical in 2-space.  In the infinite-dimension virtual world it's possible to have maps that are more detailed than the physical world (in that they can represent relationships across time and other more abstract dimensions)
  • That is some great synergy between StreetView data acquisition and Google's work on self-driving cars
  • The author is convinced that Google has an unassailable lead on building the virtual map of the world.  But without knowing what's going on at Apple (and perhaps Microsoft) I wouldn't be so sure about that.  (And even Google isn't as transparent as this realtime view of OSM edits.)
As always, James Fee has a pithy comment and a great picture. The good news is you get a ping pong table in the office.  The bad news is that 2000 more map edits just came in, so get back to work!

No comments: