Re: [Wikipedia-l] Massive photography

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(a)aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l