The idea of attaching geographic data to web based information is certainly not new. However, the applications that actually took advantage of such data has been fairly limited, especially for general users. One would definitely add stockholm, sweden to the descriptive text of a photo. Perhaps even write down the name of the plaza or point of interest but few users would go to the lengths of finding the precise latitude and longitude of where that photo was taken and write that down.
Web savvy users got software that let them categorize and even subcategorize blog entries and photos, letting their readers sort things according to the structure the data was organized. People would sooner or later either embrace the restrictions categories posed (make up your mind already!) or grow out of it.
Keywords and tags provided additional stepping stones for making text and images easier to organize. Lately, web apps like technorati and, even more so, flickr has succeeded into making tags mainstream—not only bringing cat+hat delight to you but also to your neighbour and your neighbours neighbour.
In parallel, online map applications became widely popular and some providers even added API’s that allowed the users themselves to extend their functionality. Mashups brought text-based geographical data and map-based data together and soon more and more people were expecting an answer to the ‘where’ questions in their favorite web applications.
Surely, by now, a multitude of solutions would have been created to bring geographical data into web applications? Surprisingly enough, the number of tools available for end users are still very limited. There are meta tags you can add to your web page or xml tags you can add to your feed but what if you’re a flickr user? What if you want to assign each individual blog entry with a precise location and then plot them on a map?
Well, I guess someone figured that an amalgamation of the previously mentioned xml elements and tags would be a working solution.
<geo:lat>14.923123</geo:lat>
<geo:long>55.455123</geo:long>
became tags geotagged + geo:lat=14.923123 + geo:lon=55.455123 for which you would have to write
<a href= “http://technorati.com/tag/geotagged”> geotagged</a>
<a href= “http://technorati.com/tag/geo:lat=14.923123″> latitude</a>
<a href= “http://technorati.com/tag/geo:long=55.455123″> longitude</a>
in your blog post to enable it to be picked up by technorati.
Okay, before you disappear in a whirlwind of typing to geotag all your blog posts or photos, let’s take one step back; what is so great about tags again? For one, they enable users to search and organize data in ways that make sense to them. Despite the infinite number of combinations tags can create, I can see few that would be less useful than geo:lat=14.923123+cat. Geotagged+cat seems perfectly logical though, only that geotagged is also a tag used for entries about geotagging that include no coordinates at all. And what if you name your tag geotag instead of geotagged? Your geotag will not be found by most mapping applications despite having both latitude and longitude since you can’t generally do wildcard searches (geo:*) on tags.
Two; tags, are often linked in a way so that when you click them, you’re transfered to technorati in order to see what other people are writing about that subject. Even with some serious mouse skills, quickly clicking both the latitude and longitude link will only take you to one of them.
Three; The expected behaviour of tags is that the order in which they are specified does not affect their meaning. When codependent information like longitude and latitude is split across multiple tags, it is uncertain what happens if you add more than one pair. Again, tags (which you’re expected to enter in multitude) and geotags (only one!) exhibit different characteristics.
So really, my argument is pretty simple: it seems to me that geotags, as they are currently implemented, breaks the consistency that we expect of tags. They should really make sense on their own, and that’s valid for both people as well as web applications.
- Part 2: suggesting a new geotagging mechanism
- Part three: implementation
- Part four: Future expansions
