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Cartagen was created by Jeffrey Warren in the Design Ecology group at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. Along with the advent of geo style sheets (GSS) it represents a significant step towards bringing the OpenStreetMap dataset closer to the mainstream. Just like the use of cascading style sheets (CSS) for styling web pages, GSS is a specification for designing maps. Adapted for dynamic data sources, GSS can also define changing geographic elements, display multiple datasets, and even respond to contextual tags like ‘condition:poor’. Both technologies could be key in realising a dynamic urban mapping (also through locative media) beyond a purely cartographic representation of urban space.
Cartagen is a vector-based, client-side framework for rendering maps in native HTML 5. Written in JavaScript, it uses the new Canvas element to load mapping data from various sources, including OpenStreetMap. Maps are styled in GSS, a cascading stylesheet specification for geospatial information – a decision which leverages literacy in CSS to make map styling more accessible. However, GSS is a scripting language as well, making Cartagen an ideal framework for mapping dynamic data.
Mobile devices and networks have made possible distributed reporting of geographic and temporal data, from unfolding natural disasters to organizing protests in real time. Cartagen allows users to integrate real time data streams and display them in novel ways. It also offers the possibility of rendering OpenStreetMap data which is not currently efficient with tile-based systems such as authorship and time data. A simple but useful example is that Cartagen can show live OpenStreetMap data – in the sense that viewers see edits occurring in real time, with no rendering load on the server.
With powerful mapping tools such as these, there is an opportunity for users to create their own maps – not just pushpins and overlays, but completely designed maps which incorporate live and changing data, and most of all maps which tell stories. Instead of a single canonical map for everyone, individuals and communities can make locally and personally relevant maps.
A similar project is CityMurmor, which also uses the OpenStreetMap dataset. It looks interesting but the applications appear to be defunct. The following is an extract from some of the accompanying literature:
On-line newspapers, information agency, blogs and personal websites, thematic media are monitored to highlight the pattern of perceptions on the urban space. This monitoring activity leads to the creation of an atlas that will produce – in real-time – different maps based on news sources, themes, and time. The atlas allows users to understand the urban space as a function of media attention and biases and social and cultural diversity of the city itself.
The goal of the project is to show how different media differently describe the urban space through the attention that is payed on each street of the city. In the hypothesis of the increasing importance of the on-line presence in contemporary society, a media geography has been generated intersecting the media scape with the geographical reality of the city.
CityMurmur aims at addressing maps and diagrams not as passive representation of realities but as tools for interpretation and action. It wants to build a time-based narration, an historical archive of media coverage of the urban space which is able to reveal some hidden dynamics useful for city policy support, critical media analysis, and sociocultural research.
About George
George Metcalfe recently graduated with Distinction as Master of Architecture from the WSA. A freelance designer and multi-creative, he is interested in the intersection between architecture, urbanism and information communication technology.
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