MapStory Prospectus

7/30/2019 MapStory Prospectus

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PROSPECTUS2013-2014


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CONCEPT

We began with words. Later came writing, which Abraham Lincoln felt was the great invention

of the world for its ability to enable us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn

at all distances of time and space.

In recent centuries, inventions like the printing press and the telegraph poured fuel on the re

of our stories by enabling them to spread more rapidly across a broader geography. And in the

current moment, the personal computer and its internet are transforming this human practice

again and again.

MapStorytelling is an extension of these ancient traditions, utilizing leading technologies to

empower a global user community to organize their knowledge about the world spatially and

temporally. While humanity shares one past, the ways in which individuals and groups have

experienced this past differs widely. Through a process we call MapStorytelling, we can

dramatically increase the layers of perspective we have access to, adjudicate the quality of

these perspectives based on the data they bring forward, and enable those layers to interact

with each other and accumulate so that our collective perspective grows over time.

We realize the vision of MapStorytelling through MapStory (www.MapStory.org), a social

platform that empowers a large community of experts to crowd source data within a

geospatial and temporal framework. MapStory enables the organization of expert knowledge

worldwide and over the course of history, and makes it easily accessible to a global user

community.

MapStory, as a World Wide Web application and data repository, supports long-term,

sustained data collection efforts by a global community of experts, each of whom hails from a

passionate information community that cultivates specialized expertise. MapStory represents

these data in a standardized, searchable format (to include geospatial and temporal/

chronological search), and in such a way that these data can easily be accessed, analyzed and

visualized particularly geospatially and temporally.

The ultimate goal is to enable anyone on the globe to tap the power of this new mode of

conveying ones stories, arrayed across geography and as they unfold over time. MapStoryshould become the place where MapStorytellers of all kinds convene to publish their

expressions, and to critique each others MapStories, leading to a consistently accumulating

and improving global body of knowledge about natural and sociocultural dynamics, worldwide,

over the course of human history.

Humans are natural born storytellers that constantly seeknew ways to construct and convey their narratives.


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PRACTICEMapStorytelling is a social practice in which MapStorytellers upload and shareStoryLayers (spatial-temporal data), peer review the StoryLayers of others, andcombine multiple Storylayers with other narrative features (video, images, audio,annotations, etc.) to create their own MapStories.

Prole pages allow MapStorytellers to share backgroundinformation, aggregate their work into one place, andmonitor comments and edits made by others in an ActivityFeed.

MapStoryteller

StoryLayers are openly licensed data sets that include placeand time attributes. Once uploaded, StoryLayers play muchlike a YouTube video and can be searched for on MapStory.org, downloaded in a variety of formats, and shared across

the web.

Share StoryLaye

Since MapStory drawsCreative Commons and Op

Database Licenses, any user peer review the StoryLayerothers by, for example, add

comments, assigning a srating based on a four-star sc

agging inaccuracies witagging tool, and agging

work for abu

Peer Revie

MapStories combine multiple open StoryLayers with a MapStorytellers own narrativefeatures (i.e. annotations, video, images, audio, links, etc) to enable a rich story toemerge.

Create MapStories


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MISSIONMapStory empowers a global community to organize knowledge about the world spatiallyand temporally. With MapStory, people of all kinds turn into Storytellers who can create,share, and collaborate on MapStories and ultimately improve our understanding of globaldynamics, worldwide, over the course of history.

Cultivate a Global MapStorytelling Community

EDUCATORSIgnite their studentshistorical imaginations

by inviting them to be

creators and contesters of

knowledge itself.

RESEARCHERSParticipate in a common

environment for inter-

disciplinary exploration

anchored in the variables of

place and time.

POLICYMAKERSPublish data in visual

formats that are easily

digested by the citizens and

politicians they serve.

BUSINESSESNarrate the spread of their

operations, the impact they

see themselves making and

lessons they learn along the

way.

CULTUREReligious traditions, ethnic

communities, and other social

groupings are able to tell

their own stories of growth,

movement and change over

time.

NATIONAL SECURITYProfessionals gain a tool to

better understand the current

complexities and rich histories

of the societies they engage.

NONPROFITDevelopment, humanitarian

and advocacy organizations

advance their missions by

telling their own data-rich

stories and incorporating the

prior knowledge of others into

their work.

STUDENTSFind new ways to learn

about the world and

express the themes

from their own lives and

communities that they feel

are important to convey.

JOURNALISTSImprove governmenttransparency and public

awareness by drawing upon

and visualizing a vast array of

open data.


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DESIGN

COMMON TAXONOMY AND DISCOVERY SCHEMAMapStories are searched and sorted by storytellers, theme, time, place, and quality

rating. In the future, new variables,such as K-12 learning standards, will be added based

on community need and capacity.

HIGH ATTRIBUTIONAll contributors must be unambiguously identied as members of the MapStory

community and provide transparent data sources that allow ndings to be reviewed and

tested.

PEER REVIEWA quality rating system, error agging tool, and versioned editing capability allow a best

of representation of data, with a transparent lineage, to emerge.

OPEN ARCHITECTUREMapStory is committed to the principles of open source, drawing on Creative Commons

and Open Database Licenses for its content and authoring open source code entirelyavailable to the wider developer community.

The original version of MapStory.org went live in April, 2012, representing the rstiteration of a continuous improvement process that will be driven by the insights of

early users, sponsors, and our open source development community.

DESIGN PRINCIPLES

Just as Wikipedia was built upon the open source MediaWiki, MapStory is built upon

the open source GeoNode (www.GeoNode.org), a spatio-temporal collaborative

platform managed by the OpenGeo community. MapStorys use of best of breed open

source geospatial software provides its users and stakeholders the opportunity torealize their evolving requirements over time without being beholden to the interests

of a commercial software vendor. Any developer can earn their way into the GeoNode

development community, and contribute new features that can enable students,

educators, and practitioners of all kinds to see the world in a new way.

TECHNOLOGY


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BUILDING A

FOUNDATION

The Foundation is on a path to move from early-stage social venture and public sector investment to a

sustainable mix of private giving, foundation grants, cooperative partnerships and revenue generating

services, such as:

OrganizatiOn PagesMany organizations are the authoritative sources of particular kinds of data, and all organizations seek to project

their story out into the world. Organizations that seek to contribute data and stories to MapStory.org for this

purpose can help underwrite the MapStory global data commons through a tax deductible annual donation,

securing an organization page (e.g., MapStory.org/organizationname) on which your data and stories can be

published for the world to use.

MaPstOrytelling servicesIf your organization has data and a story to tell, but lacks sufcient organic technical capability, the Foundation can

help in providing or brokering the services of advanced MapStorytellers.

Ultimately, we seek to build an endowment ample enough to sustain the MapStory.orgplatform, staff a core team at the Foundation, and develop the MapStory community as itgrows and forges new ideas over time.

MapStory.org andrelated projectsare coordinatedby the MapStoryFoundation, a501(c)3 nonprotorganization basedin the United States.

Start-up investment forthe open source softwareplatform that drivesMapStory.org was providedby the Engineering Researchand Development Center andthe Army Geospatial Centerof the U.S. Army Corps of

Engineers, an organizationwith a long-standing traditionof promoting technologicaladvances in geographyand access to geographicknowledge.

This sponsorship has enabledthe MapStory Foundationto extend the open sourceGeoNode platform withfurther temporal, socialand narrative features that

empower users with moresophisticated means of crowdsourcing spatio-temporaldata, and capabilitiesfor expressing their ownnarratives based in space andtime.


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MapStory: Education

Educators in both K-12 and Higher Ed are eager to help their students move from the simple acquisition of

knowledge regurgitated through standard exams to its application in complex, open-ended contexts. MapStory will

work with educators and other stakeholders to advance this vision of deeper learning. We seek partners interested

in piloting school-based MapStorytelling clubs, experimenting with ways to build MapStorytelling into course

curriculum, helping to incorporate state learning standards into the MapStory search taxonomy, and designing a

mobile application and mastery-based badge so that students can improve their MapStorytelling skills anytime, and

anywhere.

In 2013 the MapStory Foundation will focus attention on four specicconstituencies of the MapStorytelling community that it feels a unique

opportunity and capacity to support at this early stage:

MapStory: Biographies

Where we go is a part of who we are. To explore MapStorytelling as a tool for improving our understanding of history

and public biographies, we will work with historians, journalists, and others to begin constructing Storylayers of

historical public gures according to their geographic movement over time.

MapStory: Local

Despite the reality of globalization, the vast majority of our lives are still experienced locally, in big city neighborhoods,

small rural towns, or suburban enclaves. These localities have evolved over time in fascinating ways, affected

by changes in the environment and economy, innovations in architecture, and trends in policymaking and social

organization. MapStory will engage and support passionate residents, local libraries, museums, historical societies,

community foundations, etc. that are interested in telling the evolving MapStory of their community.

MapStory: Decision-Makers

Professionals working to affect the development of a place in some way need to have an in-depth understanding

of the historical context they are operating in. MapStory will work with these Decision Makers, particularly in the

Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief (HADR) and Urban Planning elds, to identify data that has previously

not been brought together to depict complex constructs and to build tools that help decision makers bring these

spatial-temporal narratives into their analytic processes.

MOVING THE COMMUNITY

FORWARD


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Though we have been successful at lining up funding for the rst few spirals ofdevelopment, the realization of the overall vision will require the support of institutional

sponsors and the global MapStorytelling community. This Technology DevelopmentRoadmap documents where the platform is going (based on existing funding) and wherewe hope to take it.

Background

When Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger founded Wikipedia in 2001, they simply installed a wiki and began authoring

encyclopedia-style articles. Once they established some basic conventions for content contributors to follow, andsufciently primed the pump, Wikipedia became the home for millions of encyclopedia articles that have enhanced

our shared understanding of the world. Yet, over this period of explosive growth, the wiki platform continued to evolve

under the development leadership of the MediaWiki community, which developed a wide range of new features.

When we established MapStory in 2011, we installed a GeoNode, another open source collaboration platform (www.

geonode.org), which is designed to let you share your descriptions of the world spatially and temporally, instead of

encyclopedically. However, our vision for MapStorytelling, and the requisite crowdsourcing of StoryLayers, required

signicant enhancements. Over the course of 2012, we have invested heavily in the development of new features that

enhance the temporal, social and narrative features of the GeoNode. The result of this work came in the form of a

thin-alpha, launched in April, 2012 at www.mapstory.org.

Future Development

Advanced Storytelling Features

In its inaugural year, MapStory had only the most basic annotation capabilities for MapStorytelling beyond the core

StoryLayers you selected for use. We plan signicant enhancements to the MapStorytelling Toolkit. Multi-media

enabled annotations are already in development, along with options for pausing MapStories as annotation multi-

media features play. As users introduce us to their ideas for using events, annotations, and related concepts, we

hope to rene the annotation capabilities to support their ideas. Ultimately, we intend to enable complete multi-screen

support where value-added multi-media content can scroll by as the timeline goes by, and charting/graphing widgets

can help quantify some of the changes being observed within the evolving MapStory.

One of the biggest challenges on our list is the implementation of what we call XYT Frames. In effect, this will let

MapStorytellers publish a narrative that spans multiple geographies over time, panning and zooming as necessary,offering smooth and graceful transitions. While these are common mechanisms within the Adobe Flash world, they

have never been implemented with web mapping technology. The addition of XYT Frames will give MapStorytellers

commonly accepted tools that will help them communicate their visions with the world.

MOVING THE PLATFORM

FORWARD


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Advanced Social Features

MapStory was intentionally built on the GeoNode because of its social features. Threaded comments, star rating, and

integration with Google+ and Facebook were early features. However, there are many additional social features that

we hope to include in the platform in order to ensure that the global community of MapStorytellers can continually

interact over their content, improving its completeness, precision, accuracy, and overall veracity. We intend to enable

better collaboration by enabling users to edit each others MapStory and StoryLayer titles, metadata, thumbs, etc.

We also have a vision for enabling threaded discussion and ratings at the individual feature level. We anticipate

challenges with scalability, and even with usability, but a number of users have expressed their interest in socialfeedback at this level of granularity.

Mobile

At MapStory, we recognize that there are more mobile computing devices out there than desktop and laptop

computing devices, and that this is the wave of the future. As such, we are already working to ensure that core

MapStory functionality translates into mobile and tablet environments. Our rst priority, of course, is to ensure that

MapStory resources can be discovered, viewed and interacted with from mobile and tablet devices especially

location-aware devices so users can experience the past while physically moving through it. Second, we intend

to empower users to make versioned edits while mobile. Third, we will explore the feasibility and ergonomics of

mobile MapStory authoring. Fourth, as we move forward with full 4D support, we intend to push this all the way to

the mobile device. In all cases, we are very concerned about mobile users in scenarios where they are network

challenged. We are already very focused on technical mechanisms that allow mobile platforms to cache data ofine,which are coming along quickly.

Temporal imagery exploitation

At the beginning of 2013, we will be kicking off a new development spiral that will enable users to upload time-

sequenced collections of raster imagery (more exactly, gridded coverages) over a given location. Sometimes this will

be historical aerial imagery. Sometimes it will be historical maps. Sometimes it will be broad coverage by satellites, or

even gridded outputs from computational models such as the Gridded Population of the World. We will begin with

limited raster data format support, and will expand as resources allow. We will also be providing a rubbersheeting

application at tools.mapstory.org that will enable you to geo-rectify historic maps and aerial imagery that you have

scanned in. This effort will enable smart tile generation to support high performance over the Web.

Distributed versioned editing

As part of this same engineering spiral, MapStory will enable users to create new feature types, digitize features from

the imagery, and transact them into a new StoryLayer. This will be full-on distributed versioned editing of geographic

features, offering a directly analogous implementation of the Wikipedia editing workow. This versioned editing will be

connected to the existing activity feed capability within MapStory, so that every edit you make is disclosed on your

page, and every person whose data is edited receives notications. Users will be able to monitor changes by others,

and potentially roll back these changes. Users will be able to apply this editing capability to all existing feature-based

(e.g. vector) StoryLayers.

tools.mapstory.org

As mentioned above, we will be launching tools.mapstory.org as a place that can host a wide array of online tools

that help people prepare their data for loading into MapStory. Geospatial data can be really ugly, funky, and icky,

and often must be heavily massaged before it is useful. The tools will include the rubbersheeter mentioned above,

geocoders, Flash vector extractors, Google Translate utilities, etc. Ultimately, we hope to host tools contributed by

the global MapStory community that you think may be useful to others in our community.


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Longitudinal gazetteer

Gazetteers are commonly requested tools, since people are often interested in determining the location of places

by their names. However, place names change over time. For instance, as the famous song says, Istanbul was

once Constantinople. Users want to know the name of places long ago, and how they have evolved. They want to

observe the ebb and ow of different cultures over the global landscape, and one of the best ways to do that is to

watch the spread of place names in different languages and scripts.

Security

We intend to extend our security model to support OAuth so that users can login to MapStory using their identities

on sister platforms, but also so that we can federate resources hosted on different infrastructures. This is needed in

order to integrate the rubbersheeter hosted on tools.mapstory.org with the main MapStory.org site.

Many users have expressed a need to establish private workgroups where teams can collaborate on the creation

of StoryLayers and MapStories before making them public. While MapStory already supports the concept of

MapStories in Progress, and lets users set privacy settings on StoryLayers, these settings cannot yet be shared

with a dened group. Collaborative security settings are clearly a part of the MapStory vision. We will have to

manage how these group security settings might be married to the existing Organization Page concept (e.g., www.

mapstory.org/organizationpage) which may be the preferred outlet for publishing the groups work.

Geo-Statistics on Dynamic Borders

Mankind has collected statistics by geography since the emergence of counting. The Romans census is literally

Biblical. However, the longitudinal collection of statistical data has long been challenged by the continual evolution of

administrative boundaries. Even country level statistical data has little continuity prior to WWII. Making sense of long

term change with geo-statistics is a huge challenge that we at MapStory hope to hammer out. It will begin by loading

evolving political borders at a national and subnational level. It will continue by providing users templates for loading

up statistical data against these continually evolving political entities and their borders. The development challenges

are only partially clear at this point, meaning that we must take this challenge on iteratively, and not be scared of

muddling through.

2D Dynamic Cartography

While MapStory currently has a variety of cartographic or rendering options for its users, they are not presented as aseries of palettes and best practices that those of us who are less cartographically-adept can use. Even worse, the

dynamic nature of MapStory challenges even the static cartographic conventions. As such, there is a huge need for

high quality dynamic palettes and rendering options for different kinds of data. We look forward to collaborating with

anyone and everyone in the community who may have a willingness to work on this issue.

4D Overhaul

MapStory is ultimately committed to full 4D (X,Y,Z, T) integration. Engineering for 4D has already begun at every level

of the MapStory stack (e.g., database, web service, web client), but lots of work is yet to come. Right now, the bulk

of the work is in fully supporting 2.5D plus time, where the 2.5D addresses the vertically-extruded spatial envelope

of a more complex polyhedral surface. In 2013, there will be signicant effort to fully support 3D polyhedral surfaces

composed of vertices, edges, facets and an incidence relationship on them. Our goal is to fully support CityGML

(www.cityGML.org) and Collada, and allow these complex structural features to evolve over time. We will also allow

the terrain surface to evolve over time.


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Analysis and Dynamic Web Processing

We at the MapStory Foundation are still struggling to determine how we want to harness all of the innovation being

presented by the revolution in online web processing. Providing users with simple analytical tools such as dynamic

heat map generation seems obvious enough, as it really enhances their ability to communicate visually. However,

the OpenGeo software stack on which MapStory is built already has 92 different analytical models, and this only

promises to grow. In the end, these models will not just be 2D, but 2D plus time, 2.5D plus time, and then full

4D. Such models will require very little development effort to integrate, but lots of effort in order to make them lay

accessible.

We encourage those within the MapStory community who are passionate on these issues to be vocal, and to help us

dene a vision that is feasible and which provides the greatest number of participants the greatest amount of value.

We look forward to your comments as we move forward on this front.

Conclusion

There is no real conclusion to this Roadmap. MapStory will no doubt be a living, breathing thing that will evolve

continuously. Even if we implement every feature discussed above, it will hardly be the end of history! Technology

frontiers continuously advance, creating new technological opportunities for MapStory to meet latent user needs.

We intend to continuously monitor the fast changing technological environment, and to think creatively about how

new and emerging technologies could benet MapStorytellers and the process of MapStorytelling. We look forward

to hearing from the global MapStory community for both their technological insights and their thoughts on newfunctionality. Please speak up and let us how we can improve the MapStory platform.


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WHERE'S YOUR STORY?

@mapstory

#mapstory

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