TOPP Design

Back in March, a blog post appeared on Into the Pudding in which Cholmes outlined his vision for a world in which everyone could remix web maps. It focused on lot on the technology and what not, but the kernel of the idea was to provide a more full-featured consumer mapping application—a Google Maps killer.

A few months later, in the breezy courtyard of an Italian monastery, Andreas Hocevar and I discussed the idea a little further to begin spec’ing out what it would require. We determined that any killer mapping app would need not just annotations comparable to those in Google’s My Maps but could really innovate by providing substantive map making tools—the ability to add and manage layers, style them, and export/share the finished map with the world. Like Google Maps, it would have to allow users to collaborate and share maps, but could go a step further by providing simple versioning and commenting. But unlike Google Maps, it would allow users to actually create their own maps rather than rely on the one provided. Users interested in hydrology could create maps focused on watersheds and flood plains, while users interested in social justice could create maps highlighting relationships between race and poverty.

Eventually, more advanced features like the ability to create and display buffers or allow others to copy maps while tracking their genealogy would seal the deal. Using these tools, a clever user could combine a preexisting hydrology map with a preexisting social justice map to produce a hard-hitting map showing the environmental justice issues surrounding a catastrophe like Hurricane Katrina. Most importantly though, users would not need advanced GIS knowledge or software—like what was required by many to produce such maps in August of 2006—but could instead create them easily and quickly through the web.

Andreas and I resolved that for such an application to work it would need to be easy-to-use, non-jargony, and most of the technology would have to happen ‘under the hood’—it should just work. Different projections, for example, should only appear when an unresolvable conflict arises and caching should be determined automagically based on how much traffic a map gets. A major impediment to this is the inaccessibility of good data, and I don’t know whether we can get over that hump.