Hi Mark - You've sort of hit the nail on the head of what I'm envisioning.
While the tool I'm thinking about might need to be a fat client or a heavy Java plug-in, I agree that it would need to be able to provide output to tech-challenged browsers.
Side note: the interesting thing about picking a fixed interval for animations is that a lot of weird stuff can take place in that gap, but that's a problem for a little further down the road.
If you're looking for a cool application that comes close to what I have in mind, check out: www.timemap.net.
As for Wikipedia integration, I think there are some challenges to working with map-based data that would make just contributing maps to Wikipedia a partial solution. That said, hopefully we can get a more sophisticated solution to generate maps and linked objects for the Wikipedia and then crank out what we need as content is contributed. - Jeff
"Delirium" delirium@rufus.d2g.com wrote in message news:403EA598.8060706@rufus.d2g.com...
If you have a way to do this, or get it started, by all means start adding high-quality maps to Wikipedia! If it's specialized content that doesn't fit in Wikipedia, you can start a Wikibook as well.
I for one would love to see maps of the Roman Empire's extent every 50 years through its history, to name just one example, and possibly these could be put into an animation of some sort as well (though to keep things flexible for technologically-impaired browsers and possible printed versions, we should probably have map snapshots illustrating the article as well as a link to the animated map).
Is that the sort of thing you had in mind? If so, it's something I've been looking for for a while, but I have no idea how one would go about creating that sort of thing.
-Mark