Following up on neocartography for EM
The issue of community-produced maps has reared its head on the IAEM email list today – closely linked to my post back on the 26th. The following issue was raised, and I wanted to share my reply to this.
Lack of citation was my major concern with the other available maps that have been in wide circulation. The second concern with the other maps is that they showed push-pins when they did not have or could not cite the data to support specific points.
My reply follows:
I think you’ll find that most of those maps do actually have references, in the case of the Google Maps mash-ups, they are contained in the hundreds of comments accessible from the same page as the maps. In fact, it is generally from the posting of these references in the comments, that the Google Maps get updated. What they have failed to to is to make it easier to reference the citations, by not including the reference in the popup bubble above the marker. But if you read through all the comments, you’ll likely find most of the citations there.
Another big failure is to create a timeline/history so that one can see the growth/change in numbers over time for each marker. Most of the maps are purely a snapshot of the here-and-now, and give no context via history.
The real point that emergency managers should take away from this is the following.
Agencies that ‘own’ the source information (e.g. CDC, WHO, and health agencies in every other country in this case), really should be publishing authoritative georeferenced data at the source. If agencies did this, then there would be no need for these ‘amateur’ cartographic efforts to hack together information from news, rumours and other sources. It would sure save a lot of time and effort in people trying to recreate information that already exists and either hasn’t been released, or has not been converted to a georeferenced format.
Likewise, it isn’t really the role of companies to provide this information. Once again, they are just filling a gap that we, as emergency managers, have failed to meet.
The mashup culture is a direct result of a failure by emergency managers to make information available in a form that end users clearly want it (as evidenced by the time and effort they will put into recreating the data in the form that they want to use it).
Perhaps we really should start thinking seriously about how we can produce authoritative information in formats that our communities want.
If you have a look at the example map I created in under an hour on the 26th, you’ll note that I created a little table in each popup for a marker that contained a link to the source article, and in the case of the San Diego marker, included daily figures for three days so it was possible to track the state of that marker over time.In addition, I scaled the marker images so that they were more proportional to the number of cases – a marker for each infection quickly produced an unreadable map, hence it seemed a better approach is to produce summary markers for each location, with the size of the marker indicating the numbers.
The real trick is going to be to produce a web application to track and manage this information, that can then export it in a suitable form to display the information as discussed above. This is clearly something we should look at for Sahana.