[Wikipedia-l] Massive photography

[Lars Aronsson]

The month of May is in Sweden a time when all snow has finally 
melted and we start to see flowers and green leaves on trees.  
This is why its a good month for outdoor photography.

What if I could use a GPS navigator to connect geo coordinates (as 
well as timestamps) to all my photos, and then arrange a photo 
album with a geographic (and temporal) search.  If the album was 
an international collaborative effort, we could photograph every 
street corner and get a global view.  All it would take, really, 
is to input geo coordinates to the photos at Wikimedia Commons, 
perhaps with a metadata template similar to the one that the 
German Wikipedia uses for {{Personendaten}}. The geo search can be 
added later, just like Google search indexes the text. So far I 
have uploaded a few dozen pictures to Wikimedia Commons, but a 
project like this could make that a few thousand.  Different 
technical solutions than today might become necessary.

It turns out I'm not the first to think like this.  Let's see 
what's out there:

GEOsnapper (www.geosnapper.com) is a website created two years ago 
by uLocate, Inc., a company headquartered in Farningham, 
Massachusetts.  I don't know how or if they make money from this, 
but they seem to have a contract with Nextel, a U.S. cell phone 
company, and have a special service for owners of the Motorola 
i860 GPS-enabled camera cell phone. The site uses maps from 
MapQuest.  It's a commercial company and users are "allowed" to 
upload their images for free (gee, thanks), but there is no 
Creative Commons licensing and no "right to fork".  Users cannot 
easily communicate with each other, and cannot correct each 
other's mistakes (it's not a wiki).  Some people are uploading 
pictures of individual animals, that could have been taken 
anywhere, and I don't know if anybody is weeding out that kind of 
"vandalism".  I cannot know how many pictures are in there, but 
the dozen or so that I uploaded from California, Manhattan, 
Germany and Sweden seem to have added significantly to the 
coverage of these areas.  I think that many good ideas can be 
borrowed from this site, but in its current form it has not been 
able to attract a sufficient amount of contributors. It might be 
"the Nupedia of geosnapping".  Why don't you try it out.  You can 
find all of my photos at 
http://www.geosnapper.com/list.php?op=1;user=aronsson

The Degree Confluence Project (www.confluence.org) collects photos 
from every integral crossing of latitudes and longitudes around 
the globe.  This is a hobby similar to Geocaching, attracting a 
few fanatics who visit obscure places just because they own a GPS. 
It is a fascinating concept, but really not very useful.

A9.com is the web search engine of Amazon.com.  Its Yellow Pages 
(yp.a9.com) features photos of every store front in ten U.S. 
cities, including New York City and San Francisco.  They call this 
system Block View and a technical description can be found at 
http://yp.a9.com/-/company/YellowPages.jsp

There is still an open gap between Google Maps' satellite images 
and the store front photos of yp.a9.com.  How could that gap be 
closed?  Flying around with a helicopter to photograph every 
street and city block from above?  :-)

GeoURL (www.geourl.org) connects web pages (mostly blogs) to geo 
coordinates and offers a proximity search.  No maps or photos are 
involved.  GeoURL was gone for some time during 2004, but is now 
back in version 2.0.

There are some collaborative mapping projects in Britain 
(Geowiki.co.uk, Knowhere.co.uk, OpenGuides.org, UpMyStreet.com) 
where cities are geographically documented, similar to 
Wikitravel.org, but I think that a successful project needs to be 
global.



-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se