Local, Global and Semantic Maps
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Written By Kate Zimmermann | November 14, 2006 | Share This
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Real Estate site Hotpads.com has added demographic heatmaps to their property search service. They’ve blocked out the US into color charts for Per Capita Income, Household Income, Median Age, Percent Renters and Median Rent. As Screenwerk writes, these maps plus geotargeting equals an interesting look at local search.
Speaking of map-layering, Google Earth has added a new dimension to its global panorama - historical cartography. Sixteeen maps from the David Rumsey Map Collection, including the Lewis and Clarke map of 1814, a 1680 map of Tokyo, and a 1787 map of Africa, are available as global overlays in G Earth’s latest version. The historical maps fit in with several other Google endeavors to be the world’s digital library - but this is the first of Google’s archival projects to re-contextualize primary documents in relation to modern cultural evolution. So far the maps have gotten rave reviews as a geographic resource, an educational tool, a new level of technology, and a really freaking cool idea.
Just as Google Earth layered images to make an informative world map, many analysts are scheming over a semantic map that would “create a universal medium for information exchange.” Read/Write Web has a terrific post discussing the gritty details of the semantic “web 3.0″. The post outlines how relational meta data will one day translate digital content into common language. Says RWW, “It will still take some time to annotate the world’s information and then to capture personal information in the right way to enable the kinds of applications that we have discussed. We are certainly getting close and it will be interesting to see how things unfold over the next few years.” Whether or not RWW’s predictions come true in the near future, search will be at the root of all relationships tying data together - because yet again, in the end, it’s search that makes the internet world go ’round.
Topics: Search: News |