The Memory Leak

Fantom Planet’s post suggests ESRI is paying more attention to volunteered geographic information VGI. Fantom Planet’s concept of Generation M: Me, MyMaps, MySpace is useful. Once the Generation M becomes home owners, I think we will see MyHouse, a web site that lets me use geography to organize my activities in my neighborhood.

Take flood plains for example. Recently I saw in the newspaper that FEMA was updating the flood plain maps. But wait, Generation M doesn’t read newspapers - MyHouse must get GeoRSS alerts for things like this.

The old maps are inaccurate …

To see the draft updated maps go here I must go here and pull up a very Gen-X ArcIMS site.

We have 90 days to file protests against the new maps. If I had other info I could mashup against the map, it would make it much easier to explain my protest. Protestors should be allowed to mark up a public map where neighbors can review.

FEMA needs to recognize VGI and provide guidelines for the local authorities coordinating the map updates. The guidelines would encourage (RestFul) practices that would allow sites like MyHouse to integrate. The information volunteered by protestors is crucial to allow creation more accurate maps.

On the political side, there are likely other activities in FEMA that could benefit from VGI as well, like for emergency response. So maybe when the next administration cleans house VGI can be introduced comprehensively. (Now when is that California primary?)

On the technical side, once ESRI fixes ElementGraphicsLayer.WriteXml and provides the new mashup capability in 9.3 maybe MyHouse could be built with ArcGIS Server. Until then I must say building MyHouse would be easier with other tools.

On the philosophical side, by selfishly collecting data for MyHouse I would indirectly benefit my neighborhood (my herd).

Shortly after Zillow announced they are releasing their neighborhood boundaries, The Virtual Earth blog described how this data can be chopped up by MapCruncher into tiled vectors for more efficient display.

I don’t see a realistic editing workflow though.

Let’s pretend I’m a realtor with in-depth knowledge of the boundary for a particular neighborhood and would like to edit Zillow’s boundary. Let’s assume my web map editing skills are limited to editing polygons in Google’s My Maps.

Editing the Neighborhood
I would like to go to a Zillow Web map displaying the neighborhoods (as vector tiles), choose a neighborhood, provide a Google My Maps account URL and click a button that says “edit”. Zillow would then would forward the outline of the selected neighborhood to My Maps account. I would then edit the neighborhood polygon using My Maps editing tools.

Is Google exposing My Maps in their API? When I search the Google Maps API reference for “My Maps” I don’t see anything. It would be great if I could leverage it as an editor.

Updating the Tiles
After editing the neighborhood I would then go back to the original neighborhood at the Zillow site submit the My Maps URL and click “Update”. Zillow would then retrieve the edited polygon, review it, and submit it to a MapCruncher queue. The MapCruncher process would read the queue and update the affected tiles. Maybe they could include a URL to my realty site in exchange for me improving their data. An edit history list could also be maintained.

HPC Cluster for MapCruncher
Granted there would probably not be a lot of updates to this dataset, but if there were, I think the MapCruncher queue would quickly fill up. I wonder if MapCruncher could be deployed to a cluster using Windows HPC Server 2008 cluster. If such a system could be implemented, it seems like, for example, a crowd of appraisal districts could be harnessed to maintain tiled vectors of parcels across an entire state.

In his book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, Daniel Dennett describes how Mind is not necessary for Design. Its not just the folks behind Intelligent Design that have a problem with this. Other communities are uncomfortable with this as well.

Crowdsourcing is Natural Selection
Much of the opposition to Crowdsourcing seems to reflect the same desire for an intelligent designer. Obviously crowdsourcing has worked with Wikipedia, but I wonder if it will catch on as easily with Wikimapia.

Layers are the Species
Maybe I’m too entrenched in ESRI technology, but when I look at Wikimapia, I really wish it had layers. Is there some way we could have layers without an intelligent designer? In Darwinian terms, perhaps we could think of layers as being analogous to species. Natural selection would allow new types of layers to evolve. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of a single layer based web mapping site that allows users to create new layers. Mindless users should be allowed to create new layers.

Features are the Genes
Maybe take it a step further and treat the feature as a gene. Richard Dawkins says its not really species that compete for survival, but genes. Provide a tool that makes it easy to move features from one layer to another, keeping markers to trace their ancestry. I’ve always felt deciding which layer a feature belongs in is somewhat arbitrary, so why not allow natural selection decide? Of course we’d need to relax the relational database requirement that all features have the same set of fields. Instead, XML schemas would be used. (Problem, how can schemas evolve?)

Mashups are Sexual Reproduction
Maybe the mashup could be thought of as sexual reproduction. Mindless users would mashup existing layers to create new layers. This would be analogous to Jamglue, which allows users to create new audio by mixing together existing audio.