Date:19/04/2009 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2009/04/19/stories/2009041955791100.htm
Front Page Mashups are gaining popularity by the day Sruthi Krishnan Imagination, only limit to use of this technology CHENNAI: In Bangalore, a group of citizens scoured news reports every day and marked places where accidents occurred on a map. In the daily newspaper, there is always a mention of an accident or two. And over a period of time, they had a map sprinkled with accident-related data. Patterns began to emerge and items in a newspaper that were seemingly unrelated, started making sense when put together. "Somewhere around 2006, a whole lot of mapping platforms emerged," says Pradeep B.V, who loves roaming the streets of Bangalore on his cycle. Apart from street and road information, which could be used for driving directions, maps could be used to show other kind of information, he says. "You could translate the same technology to a different domain." You can create a 'mashup' - a website that has data from two different sources. One source is the map, with geographical or spatial information. On top of it, you can add anything - show areas where jobs are available, tell your friends where the best ice creams are made or add live-videos of street corners. Only imagination is the limit to the information you can add on a map. All you need to remember is that the information should have a "where" component. These mashups are gaining popularity by the day. GoogleMapsMania - the name of the blog run by Keir Clarke, a freelance web developer based in London, says it all. Keir scours the internet looking for Google Maps mashups and he also gets four to five submissions on email every day. The blog (http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com) was started in 2005 and Keir took over in February 2008. If you have a little Javascript experience, it is easy to create a Google Maps Mashups with the programming interfaces provided, says Keir. A lot of third-party map creation tools are there for which you don't need any experience to create a mashup. You can also create a mashup using "Google My Maps," which lets you click on a map and add text, pictures or videos. "There are lots of real-time maps as well as those that show the real-time location of trains, planes and boats. These are really amazing as you can actually see the vehicles moving live on a map," says Keir. Wikimapia (http://wikimapia.org) is perhaps the biggest mashup, he adds. It is essentially a wiki on a map, so people can click on places they know and give information on the location. Mashups can be created by groups too, thanks to social networking technology. Pradeep is part of a firm called Mapunity ( www.mapunity.in ), which is a social networking community that allows people to share spatially or geographically linked information. "Whole lot of communities have information with a 'where' component," he says. To unsubscribe send a message to [email protected] with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in
