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(a)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