...As we move further along a volatility curve we leave the corporate domain completely and enter a purely grass-roots domain of community interest, community dialogue - we begin to enter the 'knowledge commons'.
There are people who are quite successfully deploying new style point collections right on top of old style traditional map servers. The integration of both of these kinds of data is of course the ideal and most desired case:
Here we see completely general solutions; usable for mapping anything - wifi-networks, peak-bagging expeditions, mountain-bike trails - the whole deal... obviously such systems have a lot of power. I suppose the only concern of the author is their scaleability to small or embeddable devices where the display is quite weak.
However for people who want to try this approach there is a good collection of tools at:
And some of the better known tools include:
As we leave the domain of 'mapping' and start to look purely at community knowledge - where the map itself is just a contextualizing base layer or raster - we see efforts like:
Geourl is especially interesting because it is the first of a new breed. It does act as a portal or point aggregator but its knowledge is actually distributed over the net itself. It is making the net "richer" by encouraging at least some kind of annotation standard.
Geourl has been written up in a number of articles (along with one of the projects this author is contributing to):
Other services that also are in the same space include these projects:
Headmap (one project that this author is contributing to) is focused both on the visualization and the categorization of transient and volatile spatial knowledge at a grass roots level. Various kinds of point collections are visualized on headmap - such as a list of natural hotsprings, a web scrape of all of the IndyNews reported riots during the preamble to the Iraq War (from the IndyNews RSS Syndication master list), and even the Geourl Dataset itself.
There are many many more examples than the brief few that have been listed. Some examples (such as moveon.org - seems to be down so here is a nearby hit):
are interesting in terms of technical features but un-interesting because they reflect central knowledge repositories.
WorldBoard (unfortunately) also falls into the same category - interesting visionary - leading concept - but not a kind of implementation approach that is desired:
Beyond this many of the smaller efforts are not visible at all or have yet to make their mark - but almost all of them reflect a common passion and interest among their respective developers; a deep interest in sharing and in a sense re-inventing and re-creating space.
