I received an email the other day from a reader of my blog with a very interesting question:

I was looking at a certain area in North East part of India ( State called “Arunachal Pradesh”) which is integral part of India.

Both URL’s have different take. [Google Maps] shows it as Disputed Territory ( with Dash lines) and [Google Ditu] shows it altogether as part of China!

So, that got me unruffled and to question validity of both these sources. How does Ditu differ from Google maps? Whats association between the two and does Ditu has autonomy to change the boundary of the maps as per its wish.

Arunachal Pradesh is a border region between China and India – with 70% of the land being claimed by the Chinese as South Tibet. The border in question was decided in 1914 and called the McMahon Line, but never agreed upon by the Chinese. The Google Ditu vs. Google Map views.

Territorial disputes are definitely not a new thing – however what is perhaps alarming is that there are two different representations of reality from the same vendor and data providers. So this is entirely a representational decision that is most likely driven by business and government pressures.

What’s particularly interesting here is that primarily these definitions of boundaries derive from the data providers. You can look in the bottom right corner for who the data providers are. For both versions the providers are the same: TerraMetrics, Mapabc, and Europa Technologies.

So it seems that the cartographic designers at Google Ditu have decided to represent it a certain way. Unfortunately, the map has no additional metadata. As broad consumption of maps increases, there is a commensurate interest in the why and what behind them. Who said these are the boundaries, when were they set, and why are they shown in this language?

And I don’t mean the long reams of unreadable metadata that are the current standards in the geospatial community, I mean human understandable descriptions of the various aspects of the data, while allowing additional discovery to deeper data.

One place that you can look at the data behind the source of the map is in OpenStreetMap. Arunachal Pradesh is shown similar to Google Maps version, and a user could optionally download the data to see the attributes, edit history and sources. Alternatively I can look in GeoCommons for the GADM Admin boundaries of India and see pertinent data on who provided the data, sources, and so on.

Boundary disputes in a bi-directional medium

The representation of boundaries is obviously a very contentious issue in mapping. Maps are perceived, and often do inform, territory. There is a long history of map representation being used to influence, coerce, and force land rights.

Unfortunately, even in a “Web2.0″ world of bi-directional sharing and collaboration, with maps we’re still often forced to accept a particular viewpoint. They have on-the-ground meaning and political impact. A well known example of this were the first “edit wars” in OpenStreetMap with the names of places in Cyprus. The resolution was to by default abide by the on the ground signage, but also store both versions and allow users to provide their own personalized perspective.

Understanding, awareness, and discussion about these issues is the reason for projects like OpenStreetMap or GeoCommons where you can download the information, build and share your own maps that represent your perspective.There

There isn’t an easy answer here – with companies such as Google there are obviously market, and government, forces that direct how to represent contentious issues. The best solution is to offer background, open data, and alternative perspectives. Without a voice, citizens are relegated to discussions by officials they may, or may not, have elected – and no meaningful way to illustrate their interpretation.

If you haven’t already heard, there are only a couple more days (Monday, March 24, 2008) to vote for the The NetSquared Mashup projects. NetSquared sponsors ‘mashups’ that promote and enable social change. This can apply to a very wide variety of projects, from awareness to funding aid. It’s incredibly easy to vote, and the top 20 voted projects of the 120+ submissions will go to the NetSquared conference in May to pitch their project for additional resources and also engage closer to the rest of the community.

When you register, you have to vote for at least 5 projects (to make sure people don’t just vote for their one personal favorite, but actually investigate other projects), and you can vote for up to 10 different projects.

I’ve personally been working with Alan Gutierrez of Think New Orleans on his incredible work in bringing awareness, and a stop to, the improper demolition of houses after Katrina. He is digitizing City Buiding permits, demolition plans, notifications, and incentive options to help citizens protect and rebuild their homes. He runs GIS coworking at Trinity church to educate local citizens on the use of GIS software for doing a lot of the heavy lifting – and we’ve been working with him to help bring all this together into the web to share and utilize by a broader community.

You can check out that project here: City of New Orleans: A Mashup for Citizen Monitoring of the Recovery

Another great project is Ushahidi: Mapping Reports of Post-Election Violence in Kenya – where they’ve built a preliminary site to accept user-contributed information on violence outbreaks.

The projects are addressing real world issues with real solutions – so far they have had success on their own and are making a difference. Independently the projects will still be successful and important and their success will only be improved upon by support of the NetSquared community.

It can be daunting to hunt through the rest of the projects. It reminds me of going through conference submissions – I would recommend going through topical areas such as “Health”, “Community Improvement”, “Arts”, etc. to make it easier to compare all the great ideas and potentials.

Remember, voting is only open until this Monday, March 24, 2008 – so please register and vote!

I’m a little behind on some news, so here’s a quick run down of interesting things from this week:

24ways to impress your friends

I wrote a very quick introduction tutorial on adding maps to your web site using Mapstraction as part of the 24ways advent calendar.

KML 2.2 Request for Public Comment

The OGC recently announced a request for public comment of the first “OGC” version of KML, essentially a stamped 2.2 that is the currently documented Google version. The standard is available at the OGC site. This comment period runs from December 4 until January 3 – conveniently timed over the popularly vacant winter holidays, but that means nice fire-side reading.

Global Child Stories with the OLPC

Reading over the large catalog of applications available an in development for the OLPC, I ran across the “Our Stories” application, developed jointly with UNICEF nad Google support, to provide a platform and site for children to annotate their communities and lives. The companion site, OurStories.org is a simple, but intriguing map of the stories from around the world. Makes me really think I need to get an OLPC to work on projects like this to help enable story telling and community building. Oddly the projec is using a unique OurStoriesXML rather than something like Atom which supports all of the desired functionality (title, description, photos, location, audio, author). I’ve suggested this on the wiki discussion.

I’m setting up a special “travelog” installation of GeoPress that I’ll be using while traveling through China and will drop a link here when it’s ready.

I currently have 68 blog post drafts (I don’t usually track my productivity v. laziness as well as Ed Vielmetti does) This is a fault of running across a lot of interesting things during my digital travels, starting to foment a post and discussion – saving the draft, and then letting it sit for awhile – usually well past the expiration date, at which point it just becomes a permanent draft.

So in the style of LabNotes, I’m going to periodically drop a quick post on the various topics and ideas I’m tracking. It’s kind of a mix of my del.icio.us feed (which I removed auto-posting to this blog, if you want the feed, just get that feed), twitter, tumblr, and my blog reader.

Location Patents that shouldn’t have been awarded – Apple recently applied for a Locative Media patent and Google was awarded a Geo-Ranking patent – both of which, on the surface, appear to be common techniques implemented in other systems. But obviously the USPTO knows.

http://my.templated.url/{-prefix|/iscooler/thanWho} – BitWorking has a draft for advanced URI templates that address some of the vocalized shortcomings of the otherwise very powerful, and widely used, OpenSearch. Namely the ability to specify several search endpoints for a single service and also rulesets for additional information required depending on the type of search. This could be very useful for continuing development of RESTful OGC services like WMS and WFS. Check out the Addressable rubygem for easy parsing and template completion of these types of URI’s.

GeoAppleTV? – someone wrote a GPS Plugin for AppleTV extensions of AwkwardTV – it’s called Road Trip and would be useful for an in-vehicle carputer. Though I still think the MacMini makes a better platform due to the optical drive, full install of OS X, and multiple ports. But the AppleTV is small and boots fast.

?q=open+mobile+software-gphone – It’s not really surprising that Google isn’t doing hardware, but instead is developing and supporting a mobile software stack. That’s what they’re good at. Leave chipsets and electronics to the SaMotorachi’s of the world (oh, and Apple).

I’ll be in Chicago later this week and I am completely psyched about the Chicago Festival of Maps. I’m just annoyed by the lack of GeoRSS/KML export of the events and locations. Looks like I’ll need to spend some time on Platial and Mapufacture to make my travel itinerary and access it on my mobile in the field.

Tigert pointed me to this research demo on Multiple Object Tracking. You are first presented with a collection of ‘faces’ spread randomly over an area. The demo identifies several (the more the merrier) ’spies’. Then the faces go back to normal and they all start bouncing around. After a short time period, the faces stop and you then need to identify the faces that were originally identified as spies. Go ahead and try it, I’ll wait…

It’s a really interesting experiment in your ability to track, both through your eyes, and perception of the objects as they move about in your periphery. Perhaps it’s a good indicator of “multi-taskability”.

However, for me, the most striking thing I found was while playing with the object tracking, I felt just like I often do when working on several projects at once. There are some ‘primary’ goals, objectives I want to or need to achieve. Bouncing around with these are a bunch of other tasks that do a lot to distract: blogging, IRC, chat, cats, food, etc. Can you track the projects for the distractions?

By the way, I got a perfect scores on all the levels, so I guess that bodes well for my projects – or perhaps I just didn’t go to a high-enough level of spies.