| The
Intermutual Bicycle Map: Towards a Fully-Featured
Geowiki
Loren Terveen and Reid Priedhorsky
Abstract
Transportation is a fundamental human need, and a key part of
successful transportation is successful navigation. People need
help to navigate in unfamiliar areas. However, most navigation
aids are designed for drivers of motor vehicles – and yet
there are other means of transportation. In this research, we
focus on the navigational needs of bicyclists.
There are three properties which are useful to consider when analyzing
navigational aids for bicyclists. Is it easy to share new information
with others using the aid? Once accomplished, does sharing reach
a wide audience? Finally, does the aid address the peculiar navigational
needs of cyclists? An ideal cyclists’ aid should have all
three properties, but no existing aids do.
We are creating The Intermutual Bicycle Map, an aid which does
have all three properties. TIMBM is an online bicycle map which
anyone can edit. It will be the world’s first fully-featured
geowiki, bringing together fully the concepts of wiki and geo.
A wiki is a website whose pages are editable by anyone who cares
to edit them, and these changes become live immediately. Perhaps
counterintuitively, this model works. The most famous wiki, Wikipedia
(http://wikipedia.org),
is an online encyclopedia with 3.5 million articles in 229 languages.
A geowiki is an online map editable by anyone. Many geowikis
exist already, such as PlaceOpedia (http://placeopedia.com)
and Open Street Map (http://openstreetmap.org); however,
none can be yet considered fully-featured. Not all map features
are editable, no rich associations be geodata and non-geodata are
possible, edit history is not exposed, or some combination of these.
TIMBM overcomes these shortcomings.
We will present the design of TIMBM and preliminary user testing
demonstrating that it will be effective and useful. We will also
discuss several interesting avenues of research in the area of human-computer
interaction which The Intermutual Bicycle Map will make it possible
to pursue.
About
the Authors
Coming soon...
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