The Royal Geographic Society’s annual conference in London generated more fuzz this year than it usually does. At the epicenter of the bustle, British Cartographic Society President Mary Spence blames Google and other Internet map providers juggernauts for “demolishing thousands of years of history — not to mention Britain’s remarkable geography — at a stroke by not including them on maps which millions of us now use every day.”

Needless to say, the online map blogosphere was really astonished by such a vision of online maps. At the Map Room, Jonathan Crowe interprets this reaction as a conflict of approach: Technology providers are focused on simplified geo data, and the Royal Geographic Society is focused on protecting centuries of mapping savoir-faire.

Adena Schutzberg blames a slow news month. Vector One blames a British society that “does not put geography and its associated technologies at the forefront.”

I don’t think that the President of the Royal Geographic Society seriously believes that online maps are too dull, simply because I can hardly see her not grasping the fact that online map providers are not focused on adding rich content to their maps.

Online map providers are merely recreating the earth digitally: they gather all the geodata of planet earth to build the backbone of tomorrow’s GeoWeb. But - thank God - those corporations’ intention is to enable users to bring knowledge to maps. They encourage merchants to list their business on online maps. They encourage individuals to bring their own knowledge of a location through free editing tools. They even have APIs to make it easy for institutions to display their loads of public data on a map.

Today, all of this is in the making. There are still a lot of hacks and cracks to be found in the online mapping space. The technology is not entirely stable yet. It’s easy for a conservative mind to step in the game and say that new ideas are less secure than old values. But in the case of online maps, the opportunities far outmatch the threats. It is way too obvious.

I would like to point out a new Website that was launched two months ago by the ex-Founder of Technorati. The service, Offbeat Guides, offers personalized travel guides. The system is fairly simple for the user: answer 5 simple questions about your next trip. In the background, the service fetches information from both proprietary sources and user-generated content to build a complete, good-looking and customizable guide, exclusively focused on the place you are about to visit.

The result - which is impressive - is made possible by geo-based technologies combined with search technologies. And it proves Mary Spence wrong (with all due respect, of course): Online maps are just a component of the rich and useful knowledge that is shaping the Web today. If the British Cartographic Society thinks it’s lacking information, I suggest they contribute to the user-generated effort.

xavierv

Tags: British Cartographic Society, Mary Spence, online maps, user-generated content

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