Frankie
My point is this; in real life ugc-land, 'unofficial' enthusiasts, (ie not
members of staff or volunteers of a museum) often very helpfully, but
inaccurately, add venue info or location data to info sources like Google
maps, wikipedia and so on. Kathy's original question and the Google Earth
example cited neatly showed this. (Of course, in other ways this is great,
and there are lots of neat things that will be done with user generated
mapping and crowdsourcing of geo-data as we get into all this.)
Google, with the best intentions, blends sources, mixes display options and
offers nice ways to add even more stuff. Trouble is, they're offering this
to everyone, and they don't know who has put the correct geo loc stats up
and so everything goes into the pot, hence the Gmaps conundrum of museums
appearing in many places at once.
I agree it'd be cool if people in museums could add their X and Y co-ords
into the code of their pages, assuming they have someone who could do that.
Geo-info in the source code would be nice, but Google would still display
all the other incorrect co-ords too, because there'd be no-one to say
otherwise. As far as they're concerned, they aren't going to hire a room
full of location data checkers to make sure all the museums on Google are in
the right place. They'd say it's someone else's job to make sure the data's
right; just like everyone else does.
So I say the buck needs to stop somewhere: I still argue that the one org
that knows where all the venues are, and in most cases knows all their
postcodes and addresses, should simply talk to Google as the one trusted
source of simple venue data and give them the low down. Preferably in live
data form.
Info is equity; correct info in a database is a valuable commodity; niche
orgs that have the chance to cluster data and wholesale it to others in
machine readable form are building sustainable forms of future income or
commodities they can use as leverage in partnerships/business models.
I'm off to bed
Jon
Jon Pratty
Digital publishing consultant, culture sector
Journalism: arts, technology and society
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http://machineculture.wordpress.com
Terrestrial: 01273 277396
Mobile: 07739 287392
-----Original Message-----
From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
Frankie Roberto
Sent: 12 March 2009 20:36
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Further to Problem with Google Earth
Kathy Harman wrote:
> I'm also really interested in the call for a centralised listing of
> core data that Jon talked about, so I will be keeping my eye out for
> developments of this type! It could have saved me a lot of time!
>
I'm not quite sure what is meant by 'centralised' here or how that'd work -
it's probably just best to expose geo data for museums in as many places as
possible in as many formats as possible.
Google collates geo data from wherever it can find it, in the same way that
it builds its regular search index. Only this morning, they announced that
they're 'blending' in even more user-generated data:
http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2009/03/will-it-blend-yes.html. The
drop-down options on their search also includes 'mapped web pages' and
'related maps'
One quick way of publishing the location of your museum is to include <meta
name="geo.position" content="50.167958;-97.133185"> in your web pages.
Frankie
--
Frankie Roberto
Experience Designer, Rattle
0114 2706977
http://www.rattlecentral.com
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