WorldMap

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This article is about the web platform. For maps of the surface of the Earth, see World map. For other uses, see World map (disambiguation).
WorldMap
Websiteworldmap.harvard.edu

WorldMap is a

spatial data
and other data forms across multiple disciplines.

WorldMap is a collaboratively edited,

GIS and web mapping to explore, visualize, and share their research materials in a GIS spatial framework, enhancing their ability to conduct academic research, community service projects, and instructional activities.[1][2] The WorldMap site allows users to add their own map layers and data sets, symbolize them, edit them, add overlays, add multimedia
content (images, video, text), control access, and share or publish them.

The purposes of WorldMap are simple: to enable one to explore the development of

scalable
platform in which students, scholars, organizations, and ordinary citizens can participate in creating and sharing any work that can be usefully represented spatially.

Overview

Worldmap is an

institutions and infrastructure, urban planning, archaeology, cultural sites, crisis areas, and health and disease. AfricaMap also includes data from the Ibrahim Index of African Governance that allows users to display and analyze results along with other data. A searchable gazetteer
in AfricaMap includes over 2 million place names readable in a multiplicity of languages.

From the outset, collaborations with other institutions interested in the potentials of the AfricaMap (and WorldMap) platform were sought. These encouraged the creation of new data and in some cases, direct links to other sites were employed to display of these data spatially in concert with additional data layers. These collaborations include, among others, the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database at

ATLA Religion Database and the Human Relations Area Files at Yale University
, associated data were first geo-referenced and then uploaded directly to the AfricaMap website. In still other cases available open source data were downloaded and entered into the system, as with a spatialized version of Wikipedia and various environmental and boundary data, or brought in from government and other sources, as in JapanMap which integrates detailed data on the 2005 tsunami among other things.

As a result, users creating maps within the WorldMap system now are able to draw on an array of global and local mapping data already brought into the system – environmental (rivers, soils,

transportation systems, and health (U.S. and U.N. global census surveys, among others). Data uploaded to WorldMap by users often are made available by them to other users, encouraging collaborations and cross-disciplinary engagements employing the same resource data. In short, WorldMap grows Wiki
-style as new data are added, with the creators of these data retaining editorial control.

WorldMap is being used by several organizations. The Institute of Advanced Studies at the

epidemiologist
Julia Finkelstein, is developing a new WorldMap instance called GlobalHealthMap, based on the current WorldMap system but also interoperable with it.

Technology

WorldMap is a

geospatial infrastructure platform developed by the Center for Geographic Analysis.[5]

The WorldMap platform is built on

Amazon’s EC2 cloud infrastructure.[7]

The WorldMap platform uses an open source software stack that is being improved and extended by geospatial developers in the US and abroad;

URLs to sites such as Flickr or uploads to the WorldMap site directly. Users also are encouraged to adopt an appropriate Creative Commons
license to define the type of attribution.

Among the important recent projects created in World Map is TweetMap, developed in a collaboration between Todd Mostak and the Center for Geographic Analysis. This project supports

GPU cards, achieving speedups over traditional databases by a factor of a million using inexpensive hardware.[8]
Among other applications, TweetMap can be used for tracking earthquakes and epidemics such as influenza in real time.

History

WorldMap has its origins in AfricaMap,

Sinologist Peter Bol, the Director of the Center for Geographic Analysis, to make a broad range of materials on Africa available within an online mapping environment.[11] Lewis, who built the first peer-to-peer GIS system ROMap in 2001,[12] had recently established the Geonomy Project[13]
with Scott Melby, from which AfricaMap's innovative technical features were based in part. These include a large searchable place name gazetteer overlaid on Google Maps, using tile services to display and query many very large layers simultaneously with transparency control and pre-cached tiles.

As users with varied interests saw how the initial AfricaMap site handled and displayed large sets of mapped data,[14] they sought similar online mapping applications for their own research interests; out of this soon came Boston Research Map (sociology), VermontMap (geology), ParisMap (history) and ChinaMap (history and political science). To meet the needs of these diverse new projects, and to add new capabilities, the decision was made to build a more general system that anyone in the world could use to create their own custom mapping applications and load their own data. By July 2011 the system had been redesigned from scratch by Ben Lewis and Matt Bertrand with many new collaborative capabilities, and re-launched as WorldMap.

AfricaMap has its origins in an earlier on-line mapping and media project called The Baobab Project (Baobab: Roots of Creativity in African Material Culture), founded by Blier at Harvard in 1993 with a grant from the Seaver Institute. Baobab, designed by Michael Roy as an interactive website, included an image and ethnographic database based on

GIS, along with narrative-form case studies framed around questions concerning the social roots of creativity (why certain cultures, places, and periods encouraged creativity and innovation in the arts). Multi-media case studies on the now defunct site, described as "one of the largest academic studies of African art" addressed a variety of themes ranging from Islam and art to architectural planning.[15][16]

Accuracy of content and quality

Paper maps and online mapping projects such as

crowd-sourced
application that will allow users to rank mapping data in the system and to comment on it.

At the same time, WorldMap has become part of several scholarly book publications, and so is also part of a larger review process: Jill Lepore on the New York Conspiracy of 1741[17] as well as Colin Gordon on St. Louis Neighborhoods[18] and Robert Sampson on Chicago neighborhoods.[19]

Other sources:

References

  1. ^ Lawson, Konrad (14 March 2012). "Using the WorldMap Platform". The Chronicle of Higher Education.
  2. ^ Ruell, Peter (17 January 2012). "Map Making Made Easy". Harvard Gazette.
  3. ^ Lewis, Ben & Guan, Wendy (2011). "Jump-starting the next level of online geospatial collaboration: Lessons from AfricaMap". In Li, Songnian; Dragicevic, Suzana & Veenendaal, Bert (eds.). Advances in Web-based GIS, Mapping Services and Applications. CRC Press.
  4. ^ Ruell, Peter (9 May 2012). "New Tool to Battle Illegal Trade in Animals". Harvard Gazette. Retrieved 14 January 2013.
  5. ^ Gangal, Sanjay (2012). "WorldMap by the Center for Geographic Analysis CGA at Harvard". GIS Café. Retrieved 14 January 2012.
  6. ^ Pickle, Eddie (February 2011). "Worldmap: Supporting Academic Collaboration with Open Source Geonode". Geonode. Retrieved 14 January 2013.
  7. S2CID 15747553
    .
  8. ^ Engelhardt, Allan (22 July 2009). "Massively Parallel Database for Analytics". CYBAEA Data and Analysis. Retrieved 15 January 2013.
  9. ^ "Mapping Africa". Harvard Magazine. March–April 2009.
  10. ^ "WorldMap: Supporting Academic Collaboration with Open Source". Geonode. Retrieved 16 January 2013.
  11. ^ Lewis and Guan 2011
  12. ^ "ROMap-brochure.pdf". Google Docs. Retrieved 2022-01-21.
  13. ^ Geens, Stefan (2 January 2007). "Geonomy". Ogleearth. Retrieved 14 January 2013.
  14. ^ Schutzberg, Adena (19 December 2008). "Harvard's AfricaMap Launches". Directions Magazine. Retrieved 13 January 2013.
  15. ^ "African Art on the Internet". Stanford University Libraries and Instructional Research. Retrieved 16 January 2013.
  16. ^ "Resources: African Arts". PBS (Public Broadcasting Service). Retrieved 16 January 2013.
  17. ISBN 978-1400032266
    .
  18. ^ Gordon, Colin (2009). Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the American City. Pennsylvania University Press.
  19. ^ Sampson, Robert (2012). The Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood. University of Chicago Press.

External links

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