Mapping our collections

Since the public outing of the Google Maps API, not to mention the extraordinarily fine Google Earth, I've been thinking about ways that we could take our collections and do some interesting things with them in a mapped space.

There are obviously lots and lots of complexities around doing this. Not least of all, an object and a place don't have a one-to-one relationship: things can be invented, stored, moved to, moved from, destroyed, taken apart, etc., in a number of different places. Representing this is kind of complex, and mapping *what* the relationship is between place and thing is obviously going to have to happen later on when/if this gets more serious...

For this first phase, I've kept it simple. An object can have one place associated with it and the association isn't stated, but is usually obvious. For example, a photograph of Birmingham New Street station is associated with Birmingham...

To do it, I took a simple XML feed from our Ingenious website and then munged some random objects into a database. Using a couple of web service lookups and some ASP code, I then generate the javascript needed for the Google Map.

First result can be seen here. Very simple, but quite satisfying.

So what next? Well, for starters, linking this in with other location based sites could be interesting. Also, the Flickr API could do some interesting stuff with other people's images, particularly if they've geotagged them. What I'm doing right now, though, is building a date field into the database so that the information could be viewed both spatially and by date - a kind of "mapped timeline". I've also wondered about if it might be possible to use SVG to connect places and objects on the map.