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“Geoweb” may become the new way to access information online

By Joyce Chang

You’ve probably heard of or even used Google maps by now. Interactive maps have become rather commonplace tools that provide services ranging from driving directions to locating nearby restaurants on a customized mash-up. These maps are often informational and entertaining. (Who doesn’t like doing the 3D zooming in the Google Maps Streetview?) But a recent analysis piece in the Financial Times suggests that maps will take on even greater significance online in the future, becoming the interface to just about everything users do on the Internet.

The article offers an example by Erik Jorgensen, a Microsoft executive. If someone is going to a theater and wants to find other things nearby, such as a restaurant, it is often more useful and logical to search by location than to do a regular search.

John Hanke of Google Earth adds:

This type of search interface obviates the need to type in keywords – just go to a digital map and browse around. “Geography is another way, a different way, to organise information,” he says. “As human beings, we inherently understand geography.”

The article notes that this new “geoweb,” or a reordering of the Internet around a geographic interface, only works if information on the Web is indexed geographically by adding machine-readable tags to documents to indicate the locations to which they refer. Mike Liebhold, a veteran technologist who is now a fellow at Silicon Valley’s Institute for the Future, likens this to “sticking Post-it notes on to Web documents.” Jorgensen estimates that 60 to 80 percent of Web pages have geographically relevant information that could be indexed.

This way of thinking about the Internet is especially relevant to the mobile world. On location-aware handsets, people could use digital maps to see information about other places that are geographically closest, which matter the most, according to the article.

Ask for a restaurant and the handset would be able to show where the nearest one is, along with how to get there and an option to book a table by text message.

The article says that once highly detailed models of the planet are created, the “interplay between the virtual world and the real world could become much more inventive.” Ian Holt, of UK mapping agency Ordnance Survey, suggests that even location-aware spectacles could be created.

“As you look around, they will overlay data about what you’re looking at,” he says, like the “heads-up” displays used by fighter pilots.

The article says these are a stepping stone towards a future digital playground called “augmented reality” in which the real world is a basic framework on which to present information.

Virtual reality would be turned inside out: rather than retreating into a make-believe virtual world, inhabitants of augmented reality will be living in real space but with layers of data overlaid to deliver a supercharged version of reality.

 

Using these technologies, real or fictitious information could be “mapped” on to the real world to create new experiences, says Mr. Liebhold at the Institute for the Future.

The idea that mapping the physical world in digital form could be a turning point in the information age and the “plunging costs” of digital imaging and geolocation equipment are allowing companies to map, plot and photograph the world in great detail, according to the article.

Thursday, May 29th, 2008 Filed under Interactive maps |