Argleton, Chapter 2: GeoMaps
Matt searches for more Argletons, but the task is bigger than he realises and he turns to Charlie for help.
“Oh, damn!”
“What’s up?” Charlie looked up from her laptop to assess the level of frustration on her flatmate’s face.
“I’m trying to compare GeoMaps and Free Map UK.” He made a sound of disgust and closed his laptop.
“Why?”
“I was searching the web last night and there are a bunch of places missing off GeoMaps. One guy in the States was complaining that his business shows up in some town 50 miles away. But no one has mentioned another phantom town. There has to be another, somewhere.”
“It’s just a copyright trap,” Charlie said. “A fake place to catch out people nicking the map and using it commercially without paying.”
“Then why didn’t GeoMaps know about it? Besides, they use street names for that, they don’t make up whole towns. But, anyway, the problem is that if you zoom in far enough to see the town names on GeoMaps, you lose track of where you are.” He sank deeper into the armchair.
“You’re not trying to do it by eye, are you?” asked Charlie, horrified.
“How else am I going to do it?”
“What if the anomaly is in Free Map UK too?”
“It’s a totally different map,” Matt protested. “Made mainly by bike couriers and their GPS units.”
“Which doesn’t mean that someone hasn’t added Argleton in there too.”
“I suppose.”
“It’s not all bad,” said Charlie. She gestured towards the machine and Matt handed it over.
“GeoMaps URLs are hackable,” she explained as she flipped the laptop open and began working. “All we need to do is split the UK up into blocks, based on latitude and longitude, and we can automatically generate URLs that present the hybrid satellite photo/map page at the appropriate level of zoom. Feed those URLs into ManyHands and ask users to OK the page if the satellite photo shows the town that is labelled on the map, or flag it if there’s any sort of phantom or missing town. Easy!”
Matt beamed at her. She couldn’t help but smile broadly back.
“What’s ManyHands?” he asked.
“It’s a crowdsourcing site,” she replied. Her fingers carried on typing as she spoke, as if they were being worked by someone else. “You ask people to do small tasks that computers find difficult, like identifying if there’s a kitten in the photo or naming a favourite vodka. Computers aren’t good at visual recognition tasks and they don’t have much of an opinion on vodka.”
“So I have to set up an account, then, and…”
“It’ll be easier if I do it. I’ve already got developer keys for the APIs we’ll need. It won’t take me long to code a little ManyHands app to pull all the data into one place. We can keep track of how many people have looked at how many blocks. I can even set it up so that it sends you email when someone says they’ve found something. Come and look.”
She patted the sofa beside her and, when Matt sat as invited, she edged over a little bit so he could see the screen more clearly. She finished typing and hit the ‘preview’ button. The screen switched to a browser view with a square of map in the centre and buttons on the right.
“All the user has to do is glance at this image, then pick a button: Yes, I see a town label without a town; Yes, I see a town without a town label; or No, nothing interesting to report. I’ll add some text at the top to explain the project in a bit more detail so people know what they are looking for and why.”
“Do we really want people to know what we’re doing? I mean, what if they just decide to go there and not tell us?”
“Is that likely?”
“Well, you have to admit that it’s possible.”
“I suppose.”
“OK, why not just say that we’re…” he paused to think, running through and discarding ideas as they came to him. “Say that we’re doing a map verification test, checking for accuracy.”
“But why would we want to do that for a company we don’t work for?”
“Erm. Uh. Yeah. Well, look, can you pull in the same view from Free Map UK?”
“You mean, the same blocks, at the same level of zoom? Should be able to, yes.”
“Then we can display them side by side?”
“Yes, we can do that.”
“Great! Then we can say that we’re looking for discrepancies. If we actually find anything strange, we can feed it back into Free Map UK, so it’s not like it’s going to go to waste.”
“Hrm, that’ll give people more work to do, so it might put them off.”
“But maybe we’ll get more people to take part if we’re actually doing something vaguely useful.”
“Perhaps you’re right. I’ll see what I can do.”
“You’re a star!” said Matt, “And I owe you a pint. So, how many URLs are we going to have to generate?”
“At the right level of zoom? Lots.”
“How many lots?”
“Lots of lots.”
“This is going to take a while, isn’t it?”
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