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If Dr Who needed a mash-up…

One of the topics which most often comes up in conversation when talking about creating new maps, is how historic information is recorded and displayed. Spatio-Temporal data modelling is a big and scary topic which has occupied the GI Research community for a number of years, and will do for a many more.

Today a simple and pragmatic approach to the problem has been introduced with the launch of the Time Space, which links a wiki database of historical events to their locations. This is not the first example of this type of web application, but the first in my knowledge to really exploit the potential of the community at a global level to contribute.

Timespace map

It will be interesting to see how this added dimension to user generated geodata develops, I can think of many potential applications, and it will be interesting to see how social history is represented compared to the big historical events.

Written and submitted from the Googleplex , Mountain View.

3 replies on “If Dr Who needed a mash-up…”

The BBC are doing something similar on a UK-wide basis with their everysquaremile project, whilst englandspastforeveryone has been running a similar (non-wiki based) project for a while.

The problem with all of these (including timemap) is that whilst it’s a noble ideal to enable the whole planet to write their own histories, it is by-and-large the same self-selecting bunch of predominately middle-class western males (myself included) who do. Given that the guidelines stress ‘No original research’ the result will be an (incomplete) list of the same histories that you could get out of any basic textbook. On a slippy map.

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