Futurismic

As useful as it is to have easy access to digital maps of the world, they throw up some odd anomalies from time to time… like this one from Lancashire, here in the UK. Google’s maps of the area show a small village called Argleton, not far from Ormskirk. The thing is, there’s no such village.

The jury is still out on the cause of this cartographic aberration: the copyfight lobby suspects it’s a deliberate mistake planted in the mapping data by an organisation  keen to catch out those who reuse it without permission (much in the way that the Royal Mail salts its postcode databases with fake addresses so it can detect unlicensed use), but Occam’s Razor suggests it’s more likely a mistyped version of the nearby village of Aughton, or some other sort of data glitch that sneaked its way into the data. These things happen, after all, especially when you pay low hourly rates to large numbers of data entry monkeys… I know, I’ve been one.

But think for a moment – as digital maps become the norm (and given the price the Ordnance Survey charge for theirs, it’s not going to take very long for that to happen on this side of the pond), will they become considered to be authoritative, even though their accuracy may not merit that authority? After all, people trust their sat-navs to such a ridiculous degree that they’ll drive down roads that pure common sense would suggest aren’t safe or worth travelling… it’s like an extension of the unfounded trust that some folk have of everything they see on television. If Google says it’s there, then there it is, right?

Adventuring a little further into the realms of participatory geography, the ability to overlay your own data on top of a basic map could allow groups and collectives to remap and rename places as they chose. Don’t like the political or historical resonances of your local street names? Then choose new ones. Want to differentiate the parts of town that you haunt from the rest of the metropolis? Draw your borders, share your maps, reclaim your city. Once augmented reality becomes ubiquitous (which surely isn’t going to take very long), it’s pretty much game over for conventional consensus geography… and the political repercussions of that are going to be interesting to watch.

Alternate-history fans will appreciate these US Department of Defense maps of a projected Soviet invasion of Western Europe, heralding as they would have done the beginning of WWIII:

This map is a really a picture in macro-scale of the epic tank battle for the plains of Germany, that entire generations of Western and Soviet officers built careers around planning and preparing for. In the history of human civilization, the Soviet Western TVD invasion was probably the most researched, contemplated, and gamed out battle that was never actually to take place. Fifty years of voluminous strategic studies were compiled by both sides on this very subject, as both sides searched for advantages in a truly enormous field chess game.

I don’t know enough about the history to say if this is paranoiac or just horrific.

[via the Exile][image and article from TechConex]

As the title says: 51 things you can’t see on Google Maps, via Bruce Schneier. No prizes for guessing that most of them are military installations or government-sponsored institutions.

In a decade’s time, will there be more things on this list, or less? Will the list vary according to which nation-state you make your search from? Will there be a ‘black’ maps service that unfuzzes the obscured areas, if you know how to find it (and if there isn’t already)?

Researchers at MOBVIS project are working on a pattern-recognition system that allows you to take a picture of a building on your mobile and have the software identify where you are and what you’re looking at:

…the genius of the system boils down to a higher-dimension, feature-matching algorithm developed by the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia, one of the partners of the project. It can very accurately detect minute but telling differences between similar objects, such as buildings or monuments, both by the appearance of the buildings themselves and their context in the streetscape.

Apparently the system gets it right about 80% of the time.

[from Physorg][from Unhindered by Talent on flickr]

What’s the cartography of your life? Google and many others want you to contribute to their mapping solutions. I won’t try to improve on Brady Forrest’s write up at O’Reilly Radar, except to say that if you haven’t checked out the Open Street Map yet, you should.