MAKING THE ULTIMATE MAP

Adding a geographical dimension to an existing application not only increases its utility but sometimes produces a level of information that's downright scary. For instance, the Federal Election Commission's requirement for digitally logged campaign contributions hadn't really caused much controversy--until Michael Frumin, a researcher for a nonprofit arts-based technology firm called Eyebeam, decided to "geocode" the information-- assigning the precise latitude and longitude to the addresses. This allowed users of the Web site he set up, called Fundrace, to type in an address and see which candidates their neighbors were supporting, and how much they gave--you could virtually canvass the neighborhood to see who gave what. An extra bonus was that the contributions came with addresses that were sometimes otherwise unlisted. (There's Ben Affleck! And he gave to Dennis Kucinich?) The consternation of suddenly exposed donors may be a harbinger of complications to come when innovative mapping pegs hitherto obscure information to a specific location. In short, we're at the beginning of the age of geo-voyeurism.

We can soon expect even more powerful ways of extracting location data from everyday information. John Frank, the 27-year-old founder of a company called MetaCarta, has a method to "geo-parse" documents and files, extracting any mention of a place. (What's more, Frank says a location need not be an address or population center but "anything that's bolted down"--a physical landmark or even a fire-alarm box.) When the word "media" appears in a document, for instance, his software uses the context to determine whether it refers to the news business or one of the nine U.S. localities that go by that name--and if it's the latter, which one. Then it tags the information with the geographical coordinates. So when someone does a MetaCarta search for a town in Iraq, a stretch of roadway or an area rich in crude oil, it searches its hundreds of geo-parsed databases (including research papers, news articles and 800 million Web pages) to come up with every document that refers to that location. Right now MetaCarta's customers are mostly in government (it's funded in part by the CIA) but similar technology will probably wind up being common on the Web.

Clearly, we're headed toward the day when any reference to a place gets tied to the actual location--and vice versa, as GPS-equipped voyagers enhance their travels by accessing the secret history of the ground beneath their feet, as well as discovering what's on the road ahead. Because commercial databases only go so far in supplying that information, a number of independent, open-source-style projects are encouraging a participatory approach in providing digital annotations to the physical world. For instance, one project collects and maps interesting examples of graffiti in the streets of San Francisco. A scheme called GeoURL encourages bloggers to tag location information to their Weblog entries. (This allows people to keep track of what's going on in their area.) Eventually, between the databases, the parsing and the geo-hackers, millions of places will be digitally annotated, and the experience of traveling the world will be akin to visiting a museum with an exquisitely informed guide.

Companies like Keyhole hope to become the substratum upon which all this information is layered--fighting Microsoft, ESRI and others for the honor. (Keyhole CEO John Hanke boasts that it already has a program to allow amateurs to post their own layers to the maps.) Ideally, they'll all coexist: think of these supermaps as the equivalent of Web browsers yielding the world's knowledge through the lens of location. They'll spur companies and governments to make better-informed decisions and enrich the experience of just plain people as they take a walk through the city, hook up with their friends and hunt for Chinese food. These will be maps that change the territory.

© 2004