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.

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!

iCommunity.tv is a fore-runner in providing video media primarily centered around geography in addition to focusing on citizen journalism , and not just videos of crazy stunts and movies served up by other media sites. Users can create custom channels and collections based on their interests and locations.

They offer a GeoRSS feed and a KML feed of the postings – which means it works very well in your Mapufacture Maps. See the feed map. Now you can add the feed to any of your Mapufacture maps to get update when a new video shows up in your community (or area of interest, for example where your family lives or you’re going to take a vacation)

Lastly, under the hood, iCommunity.tv is built on top of the Drupal CMS platform and is an excellent example of the power behind building a GeoCMS. In the future, Chris possibly plans to offer the ability for users to aggregate their video blogs through the service to allow for easier posting.

iCommunity.TV is a service of eParticipation.com

Locality also varies scope depending on what you’re talking about. Are you physically going to a restaurant? You probably are looking fairly close. Do you want an update on news? Then the larger metro area is more interesting. Weather? You’re looking at national regions (or local too, if you live near interesting geographical features).

But what do you call it?

To add to the concept, or confusion, is what people refer to these localities as. Is it: NoVA (’no-vah’), Northern Virginia, or just DC? And what would a tourist guide from Madagascar refer to it as?

Of course, English speakers are often have it a little easier because many locations have an English name – even if the location itself isn’t an English speaking location. Of course, this happens all of the time in other languages as well for English locations. But you probably recognize Roma is Rome, and España, is Spain. However, do you know where Vereinigte Staaten is? Or what about 中國 (Zhōngguó)?

We’re constantly referring to locations by names we’ve given them and not as they’re known by the people that live there. The term for giving a name for a location that isn’t used by the locals at that location is an exonym. This is what Wikipedia has to say on the subject:

An exonym is a name for a place that is not used within that place by the local inhabitants, or a name for a people or language, that is not used by the people or language to which it refers.

The name that a location is referred to by the locals is an endonym.

What is interesting looking at exonyms is that they are a marker of levels of foreign involvement in the region. As cities and areas became colonized or visited by outside people, they would typically be bequethed a name in the new language. Some of these names would just be used by the visitors, but in many cases, for long periods of time this exonym would be the official name of the city. For example, look at former Soviet states or India (Bhārata Gaṇarājya).

There was a lot of this in New Zealand as well, where the Pakeha (Europeans) would bestow English names to the large ports and coastal cities. But as you venture out of the cities and leave Auckland or Christchurch, you start passing Whangarei, Tonagariro, or Oamarau.

For a demonstration of some variations of the names in Europe, check out the Interactive Map of EUROPE and database of exonyms.

We can all just get along

Internationalization of applications has long been a difficult task and subject. It is made even more relevant as the internet, and websites, becomes widely available in many more countries. Users speaking their native languages will want to view maps of their localities, using the endonyms, localized names.

This will be especially important for projects like OpenStreetMap that seeks to create a global map, for the people. There are projects in many other, non-English speaking, countries that are doing similar projects for their own regions, and presumably in their own languages.

And excellent example is the Mumbai FreeMap that seeks to “develop an open-access spatial data infrastructure, and a set of simple tools and applications in localised in Indian languages, for knowledge transfer and participatory urban planning by communities and citizens in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region.”

How do you find all the names for a location? Flickr geocoding leverages people’s own terminology for location and maps it to a location. So a photo taken by an English speaker in Germany may be labelled: Germany, Munich. Whereas taken by a native German speaker may be labelled: Deutschland, München. Together, these tags describe the same location, but with the exonym and endonym.

So when developing web applications, in particular geographic services, keep in mind who your users will be and how they will use your tools. They may be locals and want to use their own names, or they may be visitors or virtual tourists and interested in learning more about the world outside their window.

Tags: locality, location, local, earthcode, geo, exonym, endonym, linguistics, languages, mumbaifreemap,

I think this is a simply marvelous idea. I’ve been in several European cities when they’ve had “Car Free days”, most recently in Brussels during EuroOSCON. The idea is one day of the week that everyone will go car free, and enjoy the relative quiet and easy biking/strolling about town.

Overall, I am an idealistic technocrat. I really enjoy technology, gadgets, programming, etc. However, I also enjoy natural beauty and the environment as it is. I hope that towns here in the US start promoting these sorts of activities. I mean, what’s the worse that can happen, people actually think its a good idea and turn off their lights at night?

Craig is definitely a geek, but also a geek who has gained some interesting experience with web society. To start-off, Craigslist currently has 190 sites in 35 countries, 10 million viewers per month looking at over 3 billion pages. All this with only 21 employees. For me, that was the biggest suprise of the night. With the amount of moderation, infrastructure, support, development, accounting, managing, selling (real estate, job, and apartment postings are paid), for 10 million users per month, this seems rather amazing.

Overall, the discussion was around how Craigslist, while not radical in its own right, has been steadily at the forefront and plodding along with the forefront of web culture and a connected society. The moderator brought up the points that Craigslist has been accused for the: death of newspapers, end of proper scientific study, and even the demise of pimps. It is an excellent example of user-created content made for other users creates an entire culture. It came at a time when the technology was becoming widespread and people wanted a new method of disseminating information, thoughts, and odd items for sale nearby. Craigslist was also the inspiration behind what I think was the first Web 2.0 mashup, HousingMaps (which retains as stark a UI as Craigslist itself).

Traditional media and culture is complaining that this “free for all” is ruining their revenue streams while also bringing down quality. Yet, people continue to seek and use this truly level forum rather than the Top-Down, one-way direction of traditional media. As Craig pointed out, for example, online/electronic forums can “deal with” information that is out there by correcting it, removing it, moderating it or otherwise, whereas traditional media will not be able to react, retract, or correct the original (and possibly inappropriate) classified ad or news article.

Lastly, there was discussion of the various “wars” that are waged on online forums like Craigslist. The current big war is the hot-bed discussion between pet-breeders and people who want their animal companions au naturál. There are also continual problems of dis-information ala certain public officials.

You know you’ve done well as a Website when you warrant your own Wikipedia article.

This photo is one such result of a 15 year old driving with her father in Ann Arbor. She hit a curb, then the car and flipped the SUV. It’s rather humours that the BMW SUV flipped so easily, with little apparent damage to the car it hit.

Especially humorous is that the gas-guzzling SUV ended up on the lawn of a Phud (Ph.D.) student of Natural Resources (read: hippy Environmental Engineer).

PledgeBank is a community-based site where anyone can make a pledge to perform some task, given enough support from other people. The basic premise is that more people would do good deeds if they knew they had support and help of other people. PledgeBank allows these ‘amateur philanthropists’ to congregate, share ideas and make pledges to better the world (or at least all dye their hair – it’s freeform). However, to date their successes have been primarily in the UK, due to media coverage and spinoff from their other successful sites like WriteToThem.com and TheyWorkForYou.com: Is your MP working for you in the UK’s Parliament?

TEDBlog has come across PledgeBank and is very gung-ho about it’s adoption to the US. So much so, that they are offering a $1000 bounty for the most eyepopping pledge. The US could definitely use this type of social support and interaction to promote volunteerism, activism, and general sense of community.

Americans tend to be very self-absorbed, and individualistic. This isn’t a bad thing, but sometimes it does our karma’s good to bond with other humans. Here is our chance to come together, every once in awhile, as a community.

Here is the official support response:

OCLC NetLibrary eAudiobooks are DRM protected. Your computer’s date/time clock settings must match the actual time zone, be set for the correct time of day, and must be as exact as possible. If the settings are off, DRM won’t allow the download.

Follow these steps to resolve the problem:
1. Close any Internet Explorer windows that are open.
2. Go to the Control Panel (click Start, Settings, and Control Panel) and click on the Date/Time icon to change the clock.
3. Confirm that the date is set for the correct day of the week.
4. Confirm that the clock is set to the correct hour and minute (don’t worry about seconds).
5. Also, confirm that it accurately reflects AM or PM depending on the time of day.
6. Lastly, check the time zone setting and verify it is correctly set to your time zone.

That’s great. So, I can’t get a book because my desktop doesn’t match the server’s time. Obviously a good example of how DRM helps everyone. But, hey, I don’t have to worry about the seconds. That’s really user-centric designed. They’re so thoughtful.

Of course, the error message:

The linked you clicked is no longer valid

was very helpful at the time as well. The instructions themselves bounce between full-explanation (how to change the clock), to skipping details (what if I don’t know what this DRM demon was and why he’s holding onto my bits!)

An incredible feature is the ability to build up your own thematic maps by overlaying various layers of information at your own choosing. For example, you can build a map, of say, overlay the “Percentage Housing Units that are Overcrowded” with the “Aggregated Family Income”.

Like any good project nowadays, they have a Dataplace developer’s blog.
Dataplace forums.