Collaborative Mapping that works
The title of this post is a reference to Ward Cunningham’s original description of the wiki as “the simplest online database that could possibly work“. While in theory, you could build an online database by just opening a web interface to your data, this approach just wouldn’t work without basic functionalities such as easy editing - the fact that you can type into a browser form instead of a database field -, open structure - the ability to edit the pages’ organization in addition to the pages’ data -, and most importantly, version control - the fact that all changes or deletions are kept track of and can be reversed in a matter of seconds.
In addition to these basic functions, Collaborative Mapping implies the ability to easily edit graphical stuff: either the map tiles themselves (but that’s a different approach), or, in our case, the map’s overlays. Thus the design problem facing us is to build an application that verifies each of the three properties stated above. In addition to some technical and practical problems - for instance, how do you build an interface to easily edit a polygon? - a few theoretical problems arise as well - for example, what does revision control mean when you’re dealing with sets of points?. The same kind of issues arise with the way frames and pages are organized. The goal is to find an expressive, yet simple solution to these problems. Yesterday I pushed production code’s iteration #2 which corrects a few bugs, and is a step further in that direction. Hope you like it 
November 30th, 2010 at 8:21 am
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