Neogeography

The term neogeography relates to technical developments in Web-mapping technology and spatial data infrastructures that have significantly changed how users collect, share, and interact with geographic information online. These changes can usefully be considered as a component of broader changes in the nongeo-graphic Internet referred to as Web 2.0. Good-child maintains that

Neogeography can be considered as the geographic implementation of this principle and is about both technological innovations and the new modes of interaction that these changes enable.

The two main technologies that have driven both neogeography and the Web 2.0 paradigms are Asynchronous Javascript And XML (AJAX) and Application Programming Interfaces (API). AJAX enables the development of Web sites that have a look and feel more akin to a desktop application and have improved the usability of [Page 2006]Web mapping significantly by enabling direct manipulation of map data where user interactions (e.g., click and drag) are visualized instantaneously. This new type of Web site application compares favorably with traditional Web Geographical Information Systems (GIS), where users typically click a pan or zoom control and then wait for the page to reload before visualizing the result of the interaction. The XML component of AJAX refers to eXtensible Markup Language, which is a set of data standards that enable information to be formatted in such a way that it is usable across a variety of different software. For example, using GeoRSS (an emerging XML-type standard), location can be coded into online content, such as news feeds or blog posts. This information could then be used in multiple Web applications for example, simple display on top of a base map in a Web browser or the listing of content, which is attributed to locations “near” a user of a GPS- and Internet-equipped mobile handset. In both applications, the source information would remain the same; however, the application would differ. API are available from a variety of Web sites, both spatial (e.g., Google Maps, Yahoo! Maps, or Microsoft Live Maps) and aspatial (e.g., Flickr, Facebook, Nestoria) and provide a series of functionality to third-party applications. For example, the API of Google Maps provides basic GIS operations, such as the ability to draw shapes, place points, geocode locations, and display these on top of high-resolution base map or satellite data. An example of the Google Maps API would be the Web site http://www.londonprofiler.org, which displays a variety of high-resolution sociodemographic data about London on top of the Google-supplied base map and satellite data. Although it is still a technical task to create Web sites using API, the construction of these applications is far simpler than the learning curve required to install, manage, and configure more traditional Web GIS platforms.

...