A geospatial project: Maps for Lost Towns
I joined GeoGeeks earlier this year to meet other people interested in cartography and location based data. I think that mapping content to specific locations will be a critical feature of mixed reality. It opens the door to creating customised experiences based on the visitor and their needs.
One set of geocoordinates could trigger a range of visual or auditory outputs depending on the visitor (demographics, psychographics, past behaviour), the context of their visit and other environmental cues (weather, time of day, local events, other people within range).
I'm basing this theory on my experience with digital marketing today. Online targeting is based on knowing who visits a website, their past behaviour and what they are looking for. This information lets an advertiser decide what type of content to serve that visitor whether it's through a banner ad, header image or even the adjusted call to action wording on a button.
Today, people navigate the internet by visiting websites or interacting with emails and apps which in turn direct them to specific websites. Tomorrow, people will walk around in real life and when they visit a landmark or enter a building it will have been fused with digital content.
But we can't overwhelm them with every single piece of information that's available. That would be like a super cluttered website with heaps of ads and spam. (Keiichi Matsuda's video Domestic Robocop demonstrates this point perfectly.) Instead we should only serve content that is relevant and helpful to that person.
But those awesome experiences of the future start with an understanding of how our current environment is mapped, what kind of meaningful information can be overlaid and what people do with this information.
Maps for Lost Town
Based in Perth, Western Australia, GeoGeeks holds fortnightly meet ups to explore geospatial technology using open source data and tools. The group has members with experience in all kinds of industries including mining, resources, government, and energy. Some are GIS (geographic information systems) technical specialists while others (like me) are hobbyists or programmers who want to expand their skill set. I hope to learn more about the technical side of GIS and help work on some cool mapping projects.
One of the projects the group has already begun to explore is Maps for Lost Towns.
A few GeoGeeks discovered that the State Records Office of WA has a massive database of historical maps. These beautiful maps (some over 100 years old!) have been digitised and made available to the public to view online. The maps are protected by Crown copyright which expires 50 years from the date of publication. My understanding is that as long as the maps were published in 1966 or earlier then they can be uploaded for the purposes of this project.
The maps could be a lot more useful and interesting, if we could understand visually where they fit into the maps of today. This is technically possible but the difficulty lies in the fact that there are thousands of maps to review. So the goal of the project is to georeference these maps through crowdsourcing.
Open source mapping tools
Matching or "rectifying" a map against today's streets or satellite imagery can be done through open source software such as MapWarper a "map warper/ map georectifier and image georeferencer tool". Sounds fancy, but it's actually quite an easy to use platform.
Upload a map.
Identify several control points on the map. These are points which you can confidently correlate to current day landmarks or streets.
The software rectifies the map by using the control points as anchors and then laying your map on top of current day coordinates.
Here's an example from the website. The image below is a map from 1873 of the City of Roxbury in Boston, Massachusetts.
Map from Map Warper "1873 City of Roxbury, Part of Ward 15".
The map was uploaded by a Map Warper member, Nebojsa Pesic, who identified 18 control points and then rectified the map. You can see from the next image how the old map aligns with the current map. Cool, right?
Rectified map of "1873 City of Roxbury, Part of Ward 15" via Map Warper.
So being able to rectify Western Australia's historic maps is possible (and fun!) but how do we encourage people to give it a go themselves? I hope that this a project that I’ll be able to work on in the future.