Loosely Assembled

We are in a period of mass-market place ambiguity.

Places drift, jump, and fade, physically. Some places have a much higher propensity towards noticeable drift than others, but location, in general, is not stable. The geo-web of the past few years has mostly ignored this as a low impact edge case. The era of the Google Maps API dramatically boosted developer productivity and interest within the geo space because it simplified and lowered the barriers to entry, while simultaneously reinforcing a few paradigms that find easy adoption within rapidly moving startups and business, ideas like “the perfect is the enemy of the good” and “solve for the 80% use case”. Startups are constantly faced with a to-do list that can never be 100% complete, but these catchy ideas formalize and automate the painful process of deeming some desires unworthy of your attention. Since 80% of the places that most people are searching for, or reviewing, or visiting feel relatively immune to change (at least in the “several years” lifespan much of today’s software is being designed for), we have very quickly built up a stiff and rigid framework around these places to facilitate the steep adoption of these now ubiquitous geo-services. The rigidity is manifest in the ways that place drift isn’t handled, places are assumed to be permanent.

This curve based market selection exists everywhere. Architectural guidelines and building codes are designed for average sized humans, websites are designed for the most commonly sized screens, even health care is designed, to put it another way, to ignore a certain subset of problems. I’m not making the case that we should solve every problem, every time. If we tried to solve every problem, we’d likely solve none. What I’m trying to articulate is that we are at a point, in the geo-web industry and as end users, where we can choose to keep building a concrete framework for the places that generally don’t move, and just write off the anomalies as being in the jurisdiction of specialists, or we can start building a new flexible framework that understands and incorporates place drift. If we accept that all places drift, we don’t have to divide the world into places that are easily indexed and those that aren’t, we can more closely match the human experience of flexible place allocation.

The illusion of stasis ignores the fundamental reality that every place eventually drifts, jumps, moves, or vanishes. It’s not the responsibility of any one startup to design, use and evangelize a structure intended to last for decades instead of years, but it might be an opportunity. Or it might fall into the realm of proposals that have to swim against such a strong incumbent current that it is thought best to form some sort of committee, or standards organization.

One tectonic shift that is going to press up against the old concrete framework currently in place is the explosion of real-time geo-data. This shift is forcing designers and developers to shoehorn the 4th dimension into their schemas by attaching the tweets, road reports, and sensor data with flexible glue. This is like building earthquake proof penthouses on top of old unreinforced brick buildings resulting in a Winchester Mystery House. I guess i’m advocating for both new building standards as well as seismic retrofitting of the 4th dimension into the legacy geo-data that is still being used from previous eras.

Ideally the new standards would not just implement a few more date fields (although perhaps this is all that can be expected of retrofitting), but should address issues similar to what KML’s “Level of Detail” concept can address (when you have a lot of data in a region, some is better suited for visibility from afar, while other is better seen up close). It should also be able to deal with transposition (where the temporal continuity connects various locations of a place). Finally, such a new standard should be able to address the flexible and permeable, and pixelated nature of borders and boundaries. The defined location of a neighborhood breathes, it’s alive, it’s a collection of diverse perspectives, each of these perspectives having their own native shelf lives of validity and relevancy.

I’m not just talking about when a dry cleaner moves to a new address, but also addressing the NYC’s WTC past and future, the shifting of Chilean cities from earthquake, the addition of a new wing to a museum, or when an entire mansion is stolen and relocated across state lines.

This all brings me back to the previously described idea of a scatterplot approach, where the notion of canonical location data is traded for an ongoing changing flowing morphing stream of scatterplot location data, a “location field” if you will. This field is a living entity, a wave, that adjusts instantly, and represents the pulse of data available for, from, and about a place. Places are patterns that coalesce, they emerge from, and superimpose over, other places of various size and scope.

Places are like people, we change over time, the atoms in our body are completely regenerated every N years, we learn and forget tons of things, our relationships grow and break, we migrate to whole new sets of peers, yet we somehow maintain some sense of continuity. This hybrid form of change and stasis can and should be integrated more into the digitization of our environments.

Maybe places are more about time than location.

You have a checkin tool as part of your webservice, don’t be embarrassed, everyone does. You also don’t have to be shy about the fact that you are passing the user’s lat long over to Google, Yahoo, PublicEarth, or even foursquare, for a list of potential places they might be at, because, let’s face it, these place databases are not just growing on trees. It would make sense for you to pay attention to the coordinates sent over and which place the user ends up picking as “the place they are at”, to build up a user generated scatter plot of GPS points that might be used in future candidate offerings, but sometimes we all simply depend on the longevity of benevolence from our chosen API providers, no harm in that.

I think the only harm done in this situation would be to continue to assume that a Place has a singular, static, defined relationship to a cartographic framework. If we aspire to understand what Places people are talking about, as they connect to these places with a growing variety of devices and standards, we might do well to move from a vector based polygonal model to something more pointillist.

If we can establish an array of coordinates as the historical collection of points that have been used to define, or to reference, a Place, no matter how askew they may be from our sense of the real boundaries, then we can actually start talking about the same Place, regardless of each tiny, singular, gadget or app specific definition. This methodology is conceptually related to the common notion of subjectivity, in which we learn to understand from early childhood that a toy, or a person, or a Place, looks different from different perspectives, or as seen through different media. We eventually learn that we are talking about the same kitten, even if your photograph looks different from my drawing. The concept of the kitten is just a collection of all the successful references to the physical object. Even in the act of trying to capture, or document, that actual objective nature of the kitten, we are simply creating more subjective references to it. The need, and ability, to objectively define and describe a physical object only becomes increasingly ridiculous and futile the more one tries. The same can be said of Places. The harder we strive to objectively define exactly where a Place is, or what happens at a Place, or what category a Place falls into, the more we realize our measurements and descriptions add to the collage of data they are hoping to clean up.

It’s time to put down the minimalist fallacy of Place Objectivity, and embrace the polymorphic cloud of the Social Scatterplot for Subjective Place Definition.

photo from gps insight

Cross post from the Platial Blog:

Now is your chance to beat the imminent rush and export your full archive quality KMZ maps from Platial. We are in the last stages of testing 2 new export tools and would appreciate your participation and feedback.

The 2 new tools are a full KMZ exporter with all uploaded images embedded (any images that were added to the map via the flickr tool or as a web based image link will continue to link out) as well as a newly formatted KML version with image hosting provided by GeoCommons.com.

To enable the 2 new export modes, simply append ?export=1 to the end of any map url. This should work for visitor maps (/mapv/) as well as normal ones (/map/).
http://www.platial.com/map/Cable-Access-Highlights/10095 becomes http://www.platial.com/map/Cable-Access-Highlights/10095?export=1

Note: this will enable a new KMZ and KML link in the map header area

These export tools are applicable to any map on platial.com, so if you appreciate someone else’s map, feel free to grab a copy (with the exception of a user places map (the map of all your places), in which case, it will only be available to that logged in user.

Feedback is welcome as commentary here on the blog, on the getsatisfaction page, or via the Platial feedback page.

Known Issues you can avoid commenting on:

• With very large maps, anything over 2000 points, using the KMZ version sometimes comes out with an empty file despite taking a really long time to process
• some date ranges on geocommons hosted images are missing

Thanks,

Jason

Also, You can expect a few more announcements in the next few hours and/or days about Platial. Might want to start following @platialmaps for breaking news :)

This video actually has very little to do with geography, but I do find it interesting that there are specific places, micro regions, where longevity is dramatically higher than the global average. In this TED Talk, National Geographic writer Dan Buettner discusses some interesting common denominators of these long lived, healthy and happy clusters of humans.

There isn’t actually anything very surprising in terms of specific details, but where I see the value of these findings being transformative is in various scenarios such as urban planning, architecture, community development, families, tradition making, suburbia 2.0, retirement, economic development, health care reform, and more.

China is building handfuls of cities from scratch, I wonder how many, if any, of these common denominators have a chance at being intentionally incorporated. When new cities are being designed, is there a “creative brief”?

(via open culture blog)

Great video from Derek Sivers about assumptions, opposites, logic, history, and thinking.

The example about Japanese addresses finally gives some context to the alternative global coordinate system Geotude, basically recognizing and giving names to the spaces between the lines.

This talk by Will Self starts out slow, but really gets cooking a few minutes in.
He’s talking about walking from London to New York and how to explode your many micro worlds.

I have been fascinated by “place cells” recently, and it seems the press has just caught on as well this week with many articles in major outlets covering the phenomena. I guess it takes a spectacle to get people to write headlines about science, and this VR setup for a mouse is just that.

Basically they are watching the mouse’s place neurons activate differently depending where it goes inside the virtual environment. The same patterns emerge when it returns to the same places.

I have read a similar story with fMRI and humans, but I guess what’s different here are direct neural sensors, and real time physical movement (it’s hard to get a mouse to use a joystick like the humans did). The physical movement piece is critical in learning how proprioception contributes to the activity.

There is also a video on the linked page, worth taking a peek at too.

(Via @kernull.)