We've seen how QR code lets you move from a physical object to
wikipedia but there is also the issue of going the other way. At the
moment our museum articles can list a few leading exhibits and that's
it. They also find it hard to explain where in a museum an item is.
Both issues can be addressed by using maps. The problem is our current
mapping methods based on GPS coordinates are to inaccurate for any
museum exhibit much smaller than HMS alliance and don't cope very well
if an article talks about an item in more than one museum.
So we need highly detailed maps and a way to place items in them. The
problem is that we are going beyond the detail level of open street
maps. Still they are good enough for an example of what I mean:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Geni/map
We clearly need better maps. We could with enough effort draw them
ourselves but there is another possibility. At the GLAM-wiki event at
the british museum it was mentioned that one of the reasons that
museums were trying to do stuff with their metadate was that it was
one of the few things that they hadn't already got tided up in rights
agreements. Might this also not apply to maps?
The method used for the demo is fairly clumsy but is fairly widely
used (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Labelled_image_map_templates
) and has the advantage of needing no new mediawiki code.
The maps won't work too well as part of an article in most cases which
is another issue but we could ask for a new namespace and use a
subpage of the talk page for the time being.
--
geni