Over at Flickr we’ve just turned on shapedata for various locations around the world. Aaron posts way way more over on Flickr’s Code Blog: The Shape Of The Alpha.
Now when you call flickr.places.getInfo if we have shapedata for that place, it’ll get sent back to you in the response. See Aaron’s post and the flickr.places.getInfo page itself for more information and example response data.
Since it went live I had a quick play asking for the shapedata for the States of America and it looks very much like this …
I did this by calling getInfo for each state in turn, asking for the response in JSON format. Using a canvas object over the top of the map I plotted each shape in turn. The results are pretty good.
Here’s France for fun …
… as I said in this post over here: Location, keeping it real on the streets, yo! …
“On a slightly more philosophical level, it’s a never ending process. We’ll never reach a point where we can say “Right that’s in, all borders between places have been decided”. But what we should end up with are boundaries as defined by Flickr users.”
These are not government borders, council borders or outlines from other agencies. These are generated based on the actions of Flickr users and how they choose to define their own locations, and which anyone can download and use themselves, with obviously the understanding that these are not government borders, council borders or outlines from other agencies, these are generated based on the actions of Flickr users and how they choose to define their own locations :)
Which is why it sometimes gets a little messy, see London Center Zoomed in …
… there’s various amounts of overlap, and sometimes gaps … in this case the big gaps are because I’m only plotting the top 100 “places’ in London, many of which fall outside of this view. The thin gaps between the shapes is due to the nature of the algorithm.
Anyway it’s kinda a fun stab at taking the local knowledge of the masses and turning it into something hopefully useful that anyone can use. Free shapedata for all … as long as enough people have taken a photo there :)
I’m pretty sure I’ll have to say on this topic again soon (oh and an example of how the canvas stuff all works).
Related: Here’s an image from Jim Bumgardner generated by grabbing geotagged photos tagged with the names of the lower 48 states: “Alabama”, “Arizona”, etc. and plotting them, allowing the shapes of the states to emerge …
(cc licensed http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/deed.en_GB)
It SLIGHTLY ANNOYS me that the flickr folks (not you) are referring to their mapped images as “geotagged” when they never actually got around to implementing full automatic two-way conversion between their mapping and actual geotags. I still have to manually use the import page every time I geotag new images.
Mapping was once the domain of professionals. Cartographers and geo-scientists trained in universities for several years to learn the best techniques for accurately displaying data on maps. The public often saw the end product of the map creation process, but was largely limited to scribbling on paper when it came to creating maps of its own. Beginning in 2005, this paradigm turned upside down. The last three years have fundamentally changed the way people understand their location and geography.
more ->http://www.receiver.vodafone.com/creating-maps-for-everyone
[...] Catt at geobloggers blogged over a week ago about Flickr about how they were using WOE ID to generate polygons of [...]
Hello, Would you happen to have the sample code using which you generated this? I am looking to play around & analyze it for places like India..
Thanks in advance.
I am looking for a way to tag photo/video and mark locations for a map of my current town: Hamatonbetsu, Hokkaido. It is in the countryside of Japan.
So far I have experimented with google maps:
http://tinyurl.com/hamatonbetsu-google-map
and Flickr:
http://tinyurl.com/hamatonbetsu-flickr-map
I would like your advice on the easiest way to do this all on just one map. I.e. Google`s marking abilities with flickr. I would prefer not to use Picassa, but if that is the only way to avoid making duplicate maps, so be it. Thanks and thanks for the excellent site.
p.s. Realize this not pertinent to the post in question, but I knew no other way to contact you.