It’s a question that not only concerns developers but also concerns managers and project leads.  Many projects, ranging from that small website for a restaurant, or for say a small eco-roofing company, to say a corporate intranet mapping the location of company vehicles, all eventually come to a need for a good mapping solution.

If you’d asked this question even 4 years ago it would be a fairly complicated answer.  And in fact the answer can still be complicated.  But today you have a spectrum of choice.  There are tools that range from pretty much hands off all the way to complete control.

A mapping solution is best thought of as a stack rather than a single ‘widget’.  The stack consists of pieces ranging from the ‘user interface’ to the ‘map styling’ to the low level ‘data storage’ – which can also include ‘data collection, management and grooming’.

Here’s a quick fly through of what a typical stack is going to look like;

At the top we have Google Maps.  It’s worth mentioning this one just to get it out of the way.  Most folks are familiar with the map interface pioneered by Google of course.  It is an almost ideal 80% solution for web mapping.  Since the maps are served as tiles, and since the display logic is largely running on the client, this is a very fast very satisfying user experience.  The only real drawback is that the map itself is not highly customizable.  It’s easy enough to draw lines, place markers and have popups, but it is only part of a total mapping solution.  If you have your own custom display such as you might see at http://serveyourcountryfood.net you’ll need to start dealing with managing your own data.

Most readers can stop right here basically.  If you want a simple mapping solution – just throw in Google Maps (or even Yahoo Maps) and move on to other things in your lives.  A few readers are going to need more however and the rest of this essay is for them.

OpenLayers is similar to Google Maps but it starts to enter the land of providing you real power.  This is also a client side browser based mapping solution but is open source and is very feature rich and highly customizable.  There’s been extensive support for edge cases and special features such as handling different coordinate projection types, different rendering targets ( rendering to a FireFox Canvas for example ), and things of this nature.

At this “user interface level” there also exist a variety of other mapping solutions.  Stamen Maps has a good flash based mapping solution that is open source and that you can customize.  Many other folks have also written mapping clients and you’ll find a lot of solutions to choose from.

Even here most people who are still reading are going to stop; they may need more than what Google Maps offers but Openlayers may be good enough.  But beyond this there are a few businesses and ventures that need something that provides an order of degree of more customization.  One of the projects I’ve been contributing to has a need to print maps in Arabic.  Another organization I know wants to feature an emphasis on watersheds rather than roads.  Both of these kinds of criteria start to incur radically increased costs but as well improved fidelity over your message.

When you decide to generate your own map data you’re forced down a split in choices – and your costs are going to rise dramatically.  You can go with commercial solutions such as ESRI and the like – these are very very good – superlative in fact – but you pay for this quality.  On the other side of the fence you’re going to be looking at a lot of pieces that have to be assembled with some care.

It is this ‘middle tier’ of the stack – the zone where you can customize appearance – that we’ll look at briefly now.

The art of actually ‘making maps’ relies on a designerly asthetic, it’s going to rely on good map data, and it’s going to rely on a map generation engine.  There’s a whole history of how to make maps look good.  Drop by Powell’s Technical Books to see a wide selection of books that simply deal with issues of map layout, color choices, decluttering strategies and a whole host of other complex factors.

Luckily tools like MapServer, Geoserver, Mapnik and others can automate away most of this work with reasonable defaults.  Feed these engines the right data, the right styling information and they’ll produce for you reasonably high quality maps that you can pass off to Google Maps or to OpenLayers or any other top level mapping widget.

Below this level we come to the basics of data management.  Aside from issues like caching, and scalability (which I’ll gloss over) there is the fundamental issue of storing your map raw data.  The choice here is often constrained by needing to interoperate with conventional relational databases.  Often applications treat map data as an aside, and the mapping solution has to fit within the broader scope of a pre-determined technology framework.  These days MySQL is a good choice; but up until recently there was a significant bias towards PostgreSQL because it had better feature for “spatial queries” via a tool called PostGIS.  PostgreSQL is still somewhat favored by many of the open source solutions.  As well it is worth noting that many projects ( such as my own older project at civicmaps.org ) you can even get away with just supplying “shapefiles” that are not in a database at all.

This more or less defines the basics of serving maps.  But often people who are going this far are going to be doing their own map processing as well.  These are people who are going to be using tools such as Grass to do analytics on raster map data, or the kinds of tools you can find at OSGEO for manipulating and managing vector datasets.

There is one piece below all of this that is worth mentioning: your hardware infrastructure.  Somebody in your organization is ultimately going to be serving that map on some kind of hardware.  It might be you – on your own hardware – it might be a team of dedicated sysadmins ready to jump to your every call.  Depending on what kind of mapping solution you’re providing this could range from fairly heavy dedicated machines; multiple database servers, fallover redundancy and the like – to just something as simple as a dreamhost account or an amazon EC2 account.  Almost inevitably this is going to be running some commodity operating system; FreeBSD, Ubuntu, MacOSX even Microsoft Windows – all solutions that work well.  And inevitably there’s going to be some kind of web server; be it Apache, or Mongrel or some of the other solutions.  This stuff is all pretty rote – your sysadmins are basically going to have well defined opinions on these issues – but it’s worth mentioning because each of these architectures deals with caching, multiple concurrent connections and the like in different ways and this can ultimately affect the quality of the experience [ except possibly in the case of Google Maps ].

Beyond this it’s worth mentioning that some of the basic data management chores such as geocoding can be accomplished using tools such as Geocoder.us or Google Maps itself.  There is also the excellent MetaCarta Geolocation Engine.  There is a database of place names at Geonames, and you’ll find lots of great map data all over the net such as the excellent NASA Blue Marble Next Generation, Tiger Data (for USA Streets), and Open Street Maps for streets for the entire planet ( which includes Tiger as well anyway ).  Lots of social web 2.0 services like twitter support location queries, and you can even collect random pretty images from locations using services such as Flickr.

Hopefully this serves as a quick cursory overview of the various mapping stacks and what it takes to make a mapping solution.  For 80% of website builders the answer is just going to be ‘Google Maps’; but for those who want more – the technology is there – the expertise is there – and the solutions are quite complete.

What do you call a group of folks interested in place?  A gaggle?  A cluster?  A flock?  Whatever you call it; Portland has it.  Here are a few of the extremely diverse but cartographically inclined folks and organizations that I’ve run across recently:

Humaninet

The Humaninet folks exemplify pragmatic technology needs and concern for human welfare.  They do disaster relief and disaster relief planning.  Their mission is to “help the people who help the people”.  Gregg and his team consolidate and test best practices.  They document and make these practices available to people dealing with crisis such as tsunami, hurricanes and other disruptive events.

Spend some time with these folks and you’ll hear all kinds of war stories, hopefully get to play with satellite telephones and hear pragmatic critical advice on what is really needed (versus what we sometimes think people will need).  They need volunteers and technology and are very open to new contributors. What makes them interesting from a technologists point of view is that they are a good bell-weather for the effectiveness of locative technology.  Finding appropriate mapping solutions that work in the field, under extreme conditions, often on very short time frames is harder than it looks.

Suddenly Project

On the arts side Stephanie Snyder and Matthew Stadler have been doing an ongoing lecture series over at suddenly.org .  In their words “Suddenly is a book, a set of exhibitions, and a series of public events concerning the new shape of cities beginning in Portland, Oregon this fall”.  They’ve invited speakers and artists in to examine our urban landscapes, how we respond to them and what sense of ownership we have or do not have over them.

One of the recent Suddenly evening talks took place in an abandoned parking lot in Beaverton just two weeks ago.  Literally an anti-place – a place where very few would willingly choose to go and spend an evening.  Difficult to find, not registered on google maps, without signs, it was only found by coarse directions and wandering about.  The place was eerie, sad and desolate in some regards.  We claimed it for the night with warm candles and a big table covered in shimmering glasses of wine and drinks and food and good conversation.  Matthew had brought in two speakers – Thomas Sieverts and Aaron Betsky.  The conversation was a reflection on the space we were in: what was the appropriate response to it?  Turn it into housing?  Turn it into a park?  Truly let it go and free it from the strange intersection of laws and ownership that kept it a half place?  For me the event reminded me of how little is unclaimed and yet how little of what we claim do we actually bother to steward.  It reminded me of our own fear of ownership, of taking things that are broken, even if not ours, and reclaiming and rewriting those broken landscapes.  We were rained on, and partially exposed, and yet the inclement weather didn’t keep us from talking about what was meant by these places, how we felt about them.

Laurene Vaughan and Place Making

Hopping over to PNCA there was a talk in September by Dr Laurene Vaughan visiting from RMIT University in Melbourne.  They have a masters program in Melbourne and she showcased some of the work and extended an invitation for students to apply.

There were two aspects of her talk of interest to locative folks.  She uses the phrase ‘place-making’ – a phrase not often heard but one which reminds us how important it is to be aware of the plasticity of our environments; that when we choose to do something somewhere that we start to change that place.  As well she also thinks of herself as a ‘maker’.  She works at avoiding simply talking and tries to engage in doing.

Her particular take was nuanced however – she voiced a particular interest in the ‘epistemology of discovery through making’ and talked about being conscious of the space that you yourself are in when you are creating.  In the way she used ‘place-making’ she also referred to the impact on oneself, and how the place affected the work.  Often we forget the history associated with what we make or covet; the work becomes disconnected from its geographic umbilical.  If there was one phrase that best captured all this it would be ‘material thinking’ – thinking that is not just inside the head but that is with things and with people – that you are holding stuff in your hands and moving it around, talking about it, and trying to make pieces fit.  It all sounds a bit abstruse but in fact it is very similar to the George Lakoff, Marvin Minksy and ‘embodied mind’ philosophers; and in fact the same strategy that you see in how people design walking robots these days – the idea of ‘subsumption architectures’ where reasoning and computation use the real world as part of memory rather than trying to pre-plan…

There was also quite a bit of practical discussion about collaboration; how to actually work with other people, how to actually make and measure progress.  We all know this can be hard, and she had experience here.  One maxim was that that in a group setting that if somebody suggested something then they had to carry it out – shifting the burden of responsibility.  Another technique was to do design charettes; intense focused sessions – not entirely dissimilar from what I would call a ‘code sprint’.  Part of this also included best practices that we’d recognize from software programming:  open source design, democratizing design and documenting work as you go to show process.

City Repair Project

The City Repair Project is an “organized group action” that educates and inspires communities and individuals to creatively transform the places where they live.  For example a recent project is to “depave” unnecessary pavement and concrete from urban areas in order to help reduce storm-water run off and habitat restoration.  They’re also involved in creating housing spaces for homeless folks and you’ll often see their tea van at Earth Day and other events around town.

Results Under Action

Portland artists have often cast their gaze on the issue of place itself.  The gaze is not necessarily maudlin or benign or sentimental; it can try to simply observe, to document, to laugh at, or laugh with.  Imagine if you had a giant pen and could write directly on buildings; a kind of huge graffiti.  What would you say?

Justin Gorman’s work reflects on this.  He builds transportable mobile narrative footnotes that are site specific and often large in the sense of being able to reflect on the buildings or structures they comment on and not disappear by comparative volume.  The works are transient in nature but are carefully captured in an ongoing documentation process.  His work was featured at the Time Based Arts Festival earlier in Portland this summer from PICA and he continues to iterate on the ideas at Results Under Action.  One of the things I enjoy most about this work is that it is simply large; there’s something visceral about making work that is big – that takes up space and that requires labor.

ReCode

I happened to wander past Laughing Horse Books – a progressive, anarchist and gay, lesbian, transgendered friendly space near the Green Dragon Cafe where we have been doing our WhereCamp planning sessions.  It turned out there was an evening meeting of ReCode taking place here and this it turned out was a group looking at civic bylaws and planning in order to try and create more flexibility for home builders.  One of the pressing issues for example is that there are restrictive laws on the use of grey-water.  You can throw a water collection basin on your roof but you are not legally allowed to use that water in your home.  There are a lot of silly laws like this that need to be revised and these folks were closely involved in fighting the good fight.  What did surprise me however was the degree of non-technical inclination here.  One person mentioned how nice it would be if he could bring extra vegetables from his garden to a local market; and in my mind I thought well the obvious answer was to just twitter that you had some extra vegetables and put the burden on somebody else to actually deal with picking them if they wanted them.  It’s exactly this kind of group that I hope has a chance to participate in WhereCamp and find practical ways to leverage the diversity of experience that others have.

Concluding thoughts

I’m sure this is only a tiny tiny sliver of the number and kinds of groups here in Portland.  I didn’t even mention the Systems Studies group at PSU (whom I keep running into) for example.  The fact is that we’re all involved in place in some way.  Locative media is something that we’re all poking at.  Artists and technologists both have a lot to contribute to an understanding of place. This could be an encouragement for each of us to talk about our work, to publish, to get feedback and to be a part of the conversation.  These are also in line with my own hopes for WhereCamp – to continue the discussion of place, both in a pragmatic sense and a spiritual sense.  For the pragmatists, the environmentalists, humanitarians, city-planners, there is value in the artistic critical gaze that provides new insight.

What we are seeing is increased collaboration and knowledge share between GIS professionals and amateur “social cartographers”.  The net effect of all this is that there may be less reliance on a single top down point of view and official maps of streets, places and businesses.  After many years we are finally able to provide beautiful, car centric, easy to use maps of city streets and businesses.  But instead of relying solely on what we’re providing people are instead beginning to rely on maps they make themselves – maps that have short-cuts through empty fields where there isn’t a single store, or that feature things that are not for sale.  Indeed concepts such as “friends” and “trust” are appearing which may circumvent advertising and marketing in some cases.  Consumers may start to explore their neighborhoods more and may become more neighborly and participate more in local events – and may even consume less.  This has to be stopped!

Already consumers are engaged in activities such as finding places where fruit may be plucked from trees “for free”.  See http://urbanedibles.org for example.  We are consumers not foragers – we don’t have forager report we have consumer report!  Clearly this is circumventing taxation, organic certification process, liabilities and insurance payments and much of the infrastructure that has been built to protect us.  Not to mention this kind of marginalization of clear ownership creates doubt as to some of the specific enforcement roles we’ve asked of law enforcement, lawyers and the judicial system.

We even see people getting lunch from tasty and cheap outside food carts instead of a proper sit down indoor restaurant.  There is a sense of a civic life being created that involves being outside, chatting with friends in groups of two or more and enjoying the outdoors simply for its own sake.  See http://foodcartsportland.com.  Clearly this will just lead to frivolity and enjoyment of simple pleasures!

Aside from the obvious inaccuracies of these “people made maps”, it clearly is not possible for consumers to collaboratively create quality by collectively adding to shared maps.  We are going to end up with a wikipedia like level of quality that is superficially compelling but that ultimately will have imperfections.  With individual bias, and human error, and lack of a professional auditing process and the years of specialized training that this requires – the outcome necessarily must be compromised.  As well with subjective human input places may be colored by personal experience or emotion rather than subject to the dry rigor of reason.  The fact that a certain field may be “a nice place to take the dogs for a run” is really secondary to the fact that it is a “development lot that will be turned into stylish condos”.  When communities start to favor emotional qualities rather than economic qualities there may be an aspect of “place making” that takes place.  Consumers may start to insist on things being a certain way – they may become more ‘picky’ and ‘demanding’ – and this could be bad for business.

Longer term trends could even include the diminishment of big box store outlets, chain outlets and the service industry as a whole.  People may learn to rely on neighbors and friends for things they need.  When people can see bargains “anywhere” using their social cartography tools they may go to bazaars of the back streets rather than to the convenient and shiny pseudo markets that we’ve built on front street.  Instead of staying at clean and comfortable new hotels people may even just camp for free, or stay with friends of friends when traveling, because places that were formerly invisible will show up on their maps!  Instead of everybody owning a car people might just do social hitch-hiking!  Effectively our economy will be driven underground.  The hyper-liquidity of the market that we enjoy today, with the large pools of dollars that we have at our disposal, will dry up as it becomes harder to scoop off the cream of peoples labor with taxation.

As well people may more quickly develop an understanding of their neighborhood – even if they’ve just moved there – and how those neighborhoods connect to the local environment.  See http://www.everyblock.com/ for example.  They may react poorly to issues like local superfund sites, or underfunded community schooling or other inescapable side effects of civic planning.  We really have no way of seeing what people will respond to.  There is a concerning possibility that entire communities may become highly mobilized to improve their local quality of life, their local watersheds and ecosystems at the expense of industry.  This could harm development!

How can we stop it?  Of course if we come right out and make it illegal this will just systemically foster resentment.  We’ve tried this before by giving charter rights to specific organizations but ultimately just ended up creating Open Street Maps [ http://www.openstreetmaps.org ] .  The right approach this time will require more subtlety.

We could seek to deflect genuinely new ideas by having them fit within tired old paradigms.  In particular build heavy clumsy standards that bog innovation by requiring people to be “doing it the right way” or face censure.  We can build a pro-forma “open source” consortium and define standards – while at the same time populating that standards body with vested interests that reflect traditional values.  This may work.

We could try to keep GIS professionals and amateurs safely apart so that expertise and new needs don’t intersect.  For example we could offer what appear to be grass roots “open source” events that in fact have significant barriers to entry such as holding the event in South Africa and having entrance fees even for speakers – presenting a facade of being “fair” or “egalitarian” while actually effectively blocking outsider thinking.  This will help assure that participants have the orthodox vested interests and expertise to preserve the status quo and appropriately marginalize disruptive new ideas.

It may even be possible to try and frame grass roots activity as a kind of specialization of traditional GIS – say referring to it as “volunteered geographic information” to create the appropriate radioactive waste handling wrapper around any invocation of the phenomena – and in this way treat consumer participation not as a revolution but as simply an extension in line with previous thinking and planning.

We could also try to encourage that people seek to maintain as much ownership over intellectual property and data assets as possible to minimize the possibility that the pooling of those assets creates a critical mass of real value.  Ideas about “the commons”, Creative Commons licensing, federating data, aggregation and suchlike should be avoided in all discussion.  We can laud concepts such as “open source” while preserving all other aspects of traditional business process and ownership and thus appear to be forward thinking while not compromising revenue streams.

Overall we are facing a challenging landscape and if we want to maintain the status quo as it exists, with our traditional maps, and their emphasis on official streets, well named resources, and approved place names and civic resources, we will have to work hard.  The social cartographers are organizing in two weeks right here in Portland on October 17th 2008.  We have significant challenges ahead – I beseech you to do your best to stop this menace – remember our economy is counting on you!

- anselm@hook.org