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The Hartford Courant, Conn., John M. Moran Column: `Mash-Ups' Bring Together Information For Internet Road Maps

Posted on: Thursday, 1 June 2006, 09:00 CDT

By John M. Moran, The Hartford Courant, Conn.

May 25--Cities are treasure troves of things to see and do.

Each is a unique blend of restaurants, museums, parks, schools, monuments, gardens, libraries, nightclubs, theaters and much more.

But gathering information on all the activity is a huge undertaking. Tougher still, is the job of organizing that data on the Internet so others can understand it.

All of which makes the new "mash-ups" created by students at Hartford's Trinity College so exciting.

What's a mash-up? It's a new Web phenomenon that borrows content from various Internet sites and combines it to make something new.

Trinity's mash-ups borrow digital maps from Google and link them with information that students in the college's "Invisible Cities" have gathered about Hartford.

Each mashed-up map highlights a different feature of the city. One notes Hartford's many educational resources. Another spotlights the city's historical sites. Others target food resources, abandoned buildings, and youth hangouts.

You can see this all for yourself at the somewhat cumbersome Web address of http://prog.trincoll.edu/gis/projects/fymashups.

Trinity Professor Dan Lloyd said students began by conducting exhaustive research on the sites and topics they wished to illustrate. Then they used Google's mapping function and a "mash-up" helper site to create the map annotations.

The result is a magical combination of "what" and "where" in a format that's easy to use and navigate.

"There's a lot of data in maps. They really do collect and organize things in a very useful way," said Lloyd, who co-taught the class with Rachael Barlow, a social science data coordinator at the college library.

Though it's only now getting started, you can see more examples of such mash-ups at blog dedicated to the phenomenon at googlemapsmania.blogspot.com.

Cool examples there include a map of Hollywood's hottest hotels, complete with gossipy stories of who slept and partied where; a map for tracking the real-time path of orbiting satellites; a map of BYOB restaurants in New York City; and a map that links news events with places where they are occurring.

To be sure, the technology is still embryonic. But you can readily see the potential here. Organizing information by mapping it has endless possibilities.

After you've seen a few mash-ups, you may want to give this a try for yourself. If so, head over to www.yourgmap.com and type in a few places of your own.

You might, for example, create a mash-up showing the various places you visited on your last vacation or business trip. Or maybe you'll highlight the significant spots of your youth. Or maybe you'll point out the major overseas locations that you've visited and the dates you were there.

Then you can e-mail the mash-up link around to your friends and relatives so they can readily see where you've gone and what you've done.

Lloyd, the Trinity professor, plans to build more robust software to add new features to the Hartford mash-ups.

"We want to really begin to mash-up the mash-up technology itself," he said. "Ten years from now, we'll look back at this as a founding moment in another wave of innovation in technology."

John M. Moran's e-mail address is moran@courant.com.

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Copyright (c) 2006, The Hartford Courant, Conn.

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

For information on republishing this content, contact us at (800) 661-2511 (U.S.), (213) 237-4914 (worldwide), fax (213) 237-6515, or e-mail reprints@krtinfo.com.

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Source: The Hartford Courant, Connecticut

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