Geo

In recent months there has been an explosion of people using the Internet to create, and assemble geographic information provided by volunteers. This would lead to sites such as Wikimapia and OpenStreepMap. Also, Google map is encouraging people to develop interesting applications using their own data. These are examples of VGI’s of Volunteered Geographic Information. An example of VGI is Wikimapia. This uses a lot of the ideas that wikipedia uses and applies them to this site. Anyone with an Internet connection can select an area on the earth’s surface and provide it with a description, including links to other sources. Anyone can edit entries, and volunteer reviews monitor the results by checking for accuracy and significance. This can range from entries as large as major cities to as small as a single building. It is defined by the ranges of longitude and latitude. You can also upload a hyperlink with pictures included.

Another example of a VGI is Misspronouncer. It was created by Jacki Johnson to help people pronounce some of the more distinctive Wisconsin place names. She developed a site that has an audio recording of the correct pronunciation of almost 2,000 places in the state.

Next there is Open Street Map. It’s an international effort to create a free source of map date via volunteer efforts. Which has a more elaborate focus on the earth’s surface.  For example a map of Dublin is incomplete with some street names present along with railroads and towns, but some minor street names missing. Dublin and other cities around the world lacks a cheap, readily available digital street map, so this volunteer effort can potentially fill a gap in the availability of digital geographic information.

Google also came out with redesigned software like this that was previously called Earthviewer. That would eventually be called Google earth. It was very successful because it was very straightforward. Google maps and Google earth popularize the term “mash-up”. Which is the ability to superimpose geographic information from sources distributed over the web. In some cases users could even edit the content created by others, which would become common among blogs and Wikis. The VGI would result in the growing range of interactions enabled by the evolving technology.

Next, Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) is a system that has been adopted for the geographic coordinates needed by many military agencies. It is basically a place name needed by normal people that provide the basis of geographic referencing. This is because very few people know the latitude and longitude of their house so it is essential to have tools that can identify the coordinates of locations on the earth surface. The most common of which is the GPS or global positioning systems.

Other tools used are geocoding and Geotag. Geocoding in the process of finding associated geographic coordinates from other geographic data such as street addresses or zip codes. A Geotag is a standardized code that can be inserted into information in order to note its appropriate geographic location. These have been inserted into many wikipedia entries when the content is related to specific location on the earth. For example, if there is a map of a country or state, there will be icons that you can click on that will bring you to the towns wikipedia description.