In preparation for the INSPIRE Hack in Barcelona, we keep writing to you about the many uses we foresee for Map Compositions as volunteered geographic information (VGI).
One of the many great efforts made by my Czech, Latvian and Belorussian colleagues in the SDI4Apps project is to create a mobile map viewer capable of displaying Map Compositions on smart phones.
This is a great step on the way towards being able to exchange ‘good enough’ map sketches among people ‘on the go’.
A nifty feature that we’d like to see added to the mobile Map Composition viewer is the ability to author very simple maps on the smartphone itself – and then to be able to share those maps to any sharing target that may be available/installed on the phone.
This feature would enable ‘popular’ high volume use cases such as asking your friends to recommend you a restaurant in a place that is new to you — and allowing him or her to do that from the comfort of a pool side lounge chair wherever he or she may be holidaying.
Smartphones are comparatively small — and fingers are comparatively big. This is not the user interface where space allows indiscriminate overloading of functionality. We are envisaging simple redlining tools to draw points or circle something on a static base map — and to attach textual annotation to the features.
Could be a good thing. Who knows? See you in Barcelona.
