Web tools to help amateurs in map-making

By taking the help of simple tools introduced by Internet companies recently, people all across the world are trying their hand at cartography, drawing on digital maps and annotating them with text, images, sound and videos. Hence, it is said that anyone can be a mapmaker on the web. People are reshaping the world of map-making and collectively creating a new kind of atlas that is likely to be both richer and messier than any other. Any time one can take data and represent it visually, one can start to recognize patterns and see where one needs to put resources. Increasingly, people will be able to point their favorite mapping service to a specific location and discover many layers of information about it. People are turning the Web into a medium, where maps play a more crucial role in how information is organized and found. These maps are quite similar to Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, in that they reflect the collective knowledge of millions of contributors. What is happening is the creation of this extremely detailed map of the world that is being created by all the people in the world. This fast-growing GeoWeb, as industry insiders call it, is in part a by-product of the Internet search wars involving Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and others. Online maps have provided driving directions and have helped Web users find businesses for years. But the Web mapping revolution began in earnest two years ago, when leading Internet companies first allowed programmers to merge their maps with data from outside sources to make "mash-ups." Since then, for example, more than 50,000 programmers have used Google In April, 2007, Google unveiled a service called My Maps that makes it easy for users to create customized maps. More than a million maps have been created with a service from Microsoft called Collections, and 40,000 with tools from Platial, a technology start-up. MotionBased, a Web site owned by Garmin, the navigation device maker, lets users upload data they record on the move with a Global Positioning System receiver. On the Flickr photo-sharing service owned by Yahoo, users have "geotagged" more than 25 million pictures, providing location data that allows them to be viewed on a map or through 3-D visualization software like Google Earth. Until recently, most Web maps were separate islands that could be viewed only one at a time and were sometimes hard to find. But Google and Microsoft have developed tools that make it possible for multiple layers of data to be viewed on a single map. Source: i4d Read more

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