Day 3 starts at The Hilton at 10am to listen to the following presenters talking about mapping online.

• Andrew Turner - Mapufacture
• Michal Migurski - Stamen Design
• David Heyman - Axis Maps LLC
• Elizabeth Windram - Google

In which the panel talk about the use of maps on client sites and what we can do regards to accessiblity on these very common mapping. The panel discussed that perhaps maps need to start using it’s own basemap data similar to that of a Wiki, for maps. OpenStreetMap was mentioned in which is an online mapping tool that is a free editable map of the whole world made by the internet community. OpenStreetmap allows you to view and edit and use the geographical data in a collaborative way from anywhere. This allows you to add new tags like cyclist routes. Various styling has been incorporated into OpenStreetMap so you can overlay certain styles depending on what you are interested in looking at, which may not be the standard street maps, restaurants, bars.

Elizabeth Windram from Google was asked whether Google have the ability to have customised block data for your home town / city similar to that of www.everyblock.com.

Statistics show that 8% males use North up and 8% females use direction up when reading maps and navigation using maps albeit online via GPS or a print copy. Should this be taken into consideration when offering online mapping? Again, this ability should be given so user’s can interact more with the maps on how they feel comfortable. Michael discussed that there should be the ability for users to have overlays based on their personal basis also. Michael also mentioned there is no reason why maps can’t be overlayed to show various data like travel time using a heatmap type style in grey and black that you can hide with flash or utilise this data for tabular data for certain areas or pixels on the screen.

We tend to think that maps online and should be a simple solution on how to use the basemap and making it more interactive for a better experience, said Elizabeth from Google. The London 2012 Olypics map site was mentioned on how various layers, webcams have been used. A suprisingly better talk than initially thought may be. Well done guys!