Thinking maps
 ON THE MAP. An interactive MBTA map may become available to Bostonians soon, thanks to a Cambridge-based programmer who's been tinkering with Google's powerful new cartographic tool - in his spare time. (Globe Staff Illustration) |
LATE LAST MONTH, the Internet search company Google announced it would share its cutting-edge Google Maps technology with ''outside Web developers." That is to say, hackers, who've been using the online cartographic service to create unauthorized interactive maps of everything from cheap nationwide gas prices to local street crime ever since Google's speedy, responsive service was launched in February.
Google had originally envisioned people using its European-style streetmaps and creepily close-up satellite images to size up neighborhoods where an apartment was for rent, for example, or to check out a vacation spot's proximity to the beach. But civic-minded computer jockeys had other visions. Matching the latitude and longitude points from Google Maps (which provides virtual push-pin markers for physical addresses typed into a search field; see marker on map at right) with locations from police blotters, real estate listings, and other databases, they've created free searchable maps of crime in Chicago, sexual predators in Florida, and apartments for rent in New York, to cite just three examples. The website of a Quebec City-based programmer (supergreg.hopto.org/google-yahoo/) layers up-to-date traffic data onto Google Maps for two dozen cities, including Boston--where, as of this writing, Storrow Drive at Leverett Circle looks nightmarish.
Perhaps the most quixotic Google Maps hack so far, though, is a project spearheaded by Seth Fitzsimmons, a software developer at the Public Radio Exchange, a Cambridge-based online marketplace for public radio content. Back in April, Fitzsimmons superimposed the MBTA's map of Cambridge onto Google's map of the area, then started adding the precise latitude and longitude of every T stop in Cambridge; when the map is finished, Fitzsimmons hopes, users will be able to pinpoint the stop most convenient to any physical address, and zoom in and out on that location with ease. Earlier this month, Fitzsimmons and others who've joined his project asked the general public for help determining the latitude and longitude of every T stop in Greater Boston. To lend a hand, view the most recent postings at Mojodna.net/2005/04/21/ongoing-mbta-work.
