Liberating Geopolitical Borders

Autobiogeography

Half of all people who add Places to Platial create autobiogeographies, which tell the stories of their lives through the Places they’ve lived, worked, and travelled.

My Life by mydogischelsea

Local Guides

The next most common use of the platform is people acting as local guides, mapping their favorite restaurants, bars, parks, or anything else they might share with an out-of-town guest or with local friends.

My NY by edshepp

History

Our users have compiled the beginning of a historic archive, which spans local history (Ottawa in the 1800s), world events (Where I was When 9/11 Happened, Important Protests), World History (Women Who Changed the World), Ancient History (7 Wonders of the Ancient World).

Women Who Changed the World by Tracy_The_Astonishing

Activism

Maps related to general activism are significant; toxic locations, biodiesel and alternative fuel stations, fair trade, reuse, and biking are prevalent. See our list at http://platial.typepad.com/news/2006/03/here_is_a_compi.html for quick reference.

Public Biodiesel Stations

Interests:

Birding, crafting, hiking, walking, eating, trucker slang, roller derbies, punk rock venues and mystery spots… These are just a few of the different topics around which users have created maps.

Birding in Singapore by kclama

Architecture:

A compilation of modernism, architecture found on Platial.

Travels

The function of a geo-based travel journal has given people an easy way to track where they’ve been and where they want to go.

Places I’ve Travelled

MarghalFreeman’s 20 hours to Budapest

Love, Romance and Heartbreak

This deserves it’s own section since hundreds of people are sharing their stories of love lost and found.

Hopeless Romantic Paiges

Data sources:

• Places and Place distribution throughout the globe

• Places per city

• Users per city

• Tags per city

• Places per User

• Regions with high concentration of Place counts within 1/2 degree lat/long of centers of 212 major cities (Excludes Places added by commercial sources listed as “system” data on Platial).

Analysis methodology:

• Correlating cities based on tags

• Correlating cities based on users

• Similar cities based on tag overlap

• Comparison of top 10 cities by #users, #tags, # Places

Benchmarks/assumptions:

The following are assumptions based on limited data. Portland is the origin of Platial giving it an inflated activity. Over time the true activity of Portland will emerge and members will be more geographically dispersed. The benchmarks show some of the formats used to collect and view data over time.

Sister-cities exist. This can be exposed by revealing a social topography irrelevant to proximity or national borders.

Portland and NY correlate more than Portland and Vancouver BC.

New York and Toronto correlate more then Toronto and Vancouver BC.

Some cities are gateways to many other cities

New York and Boston have high correlation to several other cities *.

Of the 10 Most Active Cities, Toronto has the lowest correlation to other cities.

* Portland is excluded from this count due to Platial being headquartered here.

Coffee, restaurant(s), city orientation and food unite across borders:

10/10 most active cities have their city name in their Top 20 tags.

9/10 most active cities list coffee in their Top 20 tags.

9/10 most active cities list restaurant(s).

8/10 most active cities list food.

Art and home also rank high across the board.

Unique features of each city still stand out:

Portland lists street art, graffiti and DIY in top 20 tags.

London lists sculpture, bars, and architecture in their Top 20.

Music, bus tickets, and mailing services are unique to Chicago’s Top 20.

Citizens are charting a collective course throughout the world, which can begin to be articulated and which reduces the importance of national borders.

Shenzhen has more Places than Memphis.

Visualization of a universal city skyline where each city represents one building.

Maps could be used to increase ties with people in isolated lands (providing internet access and good base map technology).

Melbourne, Bangalore, Helsinki, Taipei, Milan, Osaka, and Tokyo all have the same exact representation.

Repository Architecture

At the core of the repository design is a set of geolocated items. The notion of an item is open-ended, and users of the API (and in future the GUI) can define their own types of items. The item class hierarchy is seeded with three basic types: places, events, and posts (a "post" consists of user commentary about a place or event, and resembles a blog post). Additional item types are defined by specifying property sheets. This will enable characterization by users of the kinds of geolocated things that interest them: bird sightings, surf spots, historical buildings, etcetera. Google Base is the most prominent current example of this general approach to open data types, but not the most recent. We employ the more easily aggregated and earlier RDF formulation: our item types are definable as an RDF/OWL class.

The use of the comparatively free-wheeling RDF data formalism is fundamental to extensibility, and differentiates our approach from the RDBMS data model that underpins conventional GIS. However, motivated by performance considerations, our implementation is a hybrid. In effect we bolt an RDF triple store for item property sheets onto a more traditional framework for static aspects of the data design.

The repository also contains aggregates of items - things that correspond roughly to GIS layers, except that they impose fewer type constraints on members. From the user's perspective, some aggregates are built explicitly by adding items to "maps," and others implicitly by queries or tagging. Other varieties of supporting data are present as well , representing such things as user accounts, buddy lists, and grievances.

API

The API provides web access to repository contents. Like the repository itself, it is formulated in RDF terms: a call to the API is an RDF object representing a method application. A choice of XML and JSON syntax is available. Calls in the XML syntax generally resemble XML-RPC; the JSON syntax is simpler and more concise.

The API uses URIs rather than simple identifiers in naming. For example, names of items in the Platial repository have the form http://platial.com/rdf/item/1234. A consequence is that content can be aggregated from multiple repositories using the API (and our licensing terms do not restrict use of the API by others).

GeoRSS feeds

The notion of tagging RSS items with geographic locations has been around since at least 2002 (blogmapper exploited this idea). In current practice, two variants of geotagging of RSS items have reasonably widespread adoption or mindshare: one relies on the W3C geo vocabulary (http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/), with tags geo:lat, geo:long, geo:alt, and the other, more recent development, is the http://georss.org/ initiative, which covers more cases (such as tagging items with lines and polygons as well as points). Platial provides the latter variety of feed over common filters on its data (e.g. by contributor and bounding box, or by map).