Why is it that most major universities maps are still relegated to the old scanned paper copy? Check out the beauty that is University of Michigan’s Campus map. It’s amazing that a major university still uses GIF images for their campus maps.

Now, they know what mapping is, check out their cool transit services. There is even a 3D Atlas of Ann Arbor in Google Earth.

It’s not hard to make this into a more usable dynamic map. I used the MetaCarta’s Map Rectifier to take the campus map image, rectify it using several control points (intersections and circles work great for this) and created a slippy campus map.

You can play with the actual Campus Map here on MapSomething. The next steps would be searchable campus directory, click on buildings to get info on rooms, open times, phone numbers, a way to upload your schedule and have it plan out your route, etc.

Maybe I should send this on over to the School of Information or the Community Information Corps

I mentioned Metacarta last week after I saw their presentation at Where2.0.

They mentioned having a public GeoParser API available for developers to play around with. So I passed in one of the output feeds from FoFRedux (a feed aggregator that supports GeoRSS) through the Metacarta GeoParser to produce a map of locations that show up in my feeds.

FoFRedux -> Metacarta Example: SlashDot article locations

So now you can use a feed aggregator to display, say locations of articles and posts for your friends feeds. Or locations of Flickr photos, or even UPS/Fedex package tracking. The example just shows the image output, but the GeoParser can output GML or GeoMarkup XML, and JSON for better intergration into other applications.