First, an apology - this is an un-illustrated talk. For me, especially since coming from the National Geographic Society, it's inexcusable; it's appalling, and perhaps unprecedented. I apologize. The reason is that two weeks from today, we launch our new interactive atlas - for future reference, at www.nationalgeographic.com/mapmachine. As you can imagine, it is not quite ready for prime time and we're in professional panic mode right now. It's going to be very, very exciting. It's really a dream fulfilled for me, but I was hoping to be able to show you something today - maybe I'm just trying to build the suspense toward the launch on October 27th. Actually, it's a dual event. On that day, we'll have a press event to announce the publication of the 7th edition of our venerable Atlas of the World - the first one that is supported by a digital database and a relational names database - and this new interactive atlas. We've had very modest map functionality on the website - embarrassingly modest map functionality, made up 300-400 static raster maps. Despite the modest nature of that presence, it is month-in and month-out one of the most popular and heavily visited parts of our site. This indicates a couple of things to me - people like maps, which is a good thing in terms of job security, and people are coming to National Geographic thinking "Gee, where can I find maps? - National Geographic might be a logical place to go." So we're hopeful that after this launch, our already popular site will become vastly more so.
I'll tell you a little bit more about the site very briefly so we'll have time for discussion. Our concept has several components. One of them is to carry forward the Society's 111-year-old mission. Our dear founding fathers back in 1888 put us together to influence and diffuse geographic knowledge. It's my feeling that there's a certain irony in that, since it's only now, a century after the founding, that we finally truly have the means to diffuse geographic knowledge. This new capability on the web positions us for the 21st century in terms of taking that venerable old mission and doing things to it and with it that our founding fathers never even imagined.
Another notion is to redefine what an atlas is all about, at least for our own atlas users. Our 7th edition atlas and the previous ones were, of course, a means of access to authoritative but instantly dated and rather static information. The interactive atlas will open the doors, and instead of merely a useful reference it will be a means of access to vast and continually updated spatial information all across the world. So it's a very exciting notion to me.
Finally our goal is - perhaps not the day after launch but rather a
year or two years after launch - to become really the "consumer" site for
geography and maps and spatial information. A little more on that later
in terms of how we might be perceived to compete or (I hope) not to compete
with other initiatives such as Digital Earth.
Functionality is to be simple yet powerful, which is, of course, difficult
to do. It will work on standard browsers without lots of fancy downloads
of applets and Java scripts, etc. You'll start with, as you might expect,
a world map and a field. On the world map you can of course drill down
and pan across. The field is backed up by a gazetteer that our partners
at ESRI are busily preparing. I need to back up a minute about the partnership.
We are delighted to be working with ESRI on this. It's a perfect alignment
of our somewhat different missions, and ESRI of course brings huge software
and technical expertise to the table. We bring our brand and our increasingly
global reach, so it is an ideal partnership. At any rate, they are cobbling
together very quickly and very aptly the NIMA and the USGS and their own
gazetteers and working hard to integrate them and put names into categories,
so that when people are doing a relatively simple search, they can quickly
find what they are looking for.
Two main parts of the Map Machine to begin with: one is a set of raster images of every plate in the 7th edition atlas - every map plate. Users can zoom in to one-to-one on those map plates; print them out if they wish. There was some minor concern about cannibalization but, of course, to print out the entire atlas might take several years worth of effort on the standard desktop PC. This will allow us to publicize the atlas but it will also allow us to keep that atlas continually updated. So, as place names change and countries gain independence, etc, we'll update those and people will theoretically be able to print out a little patch and stick it in their book if they so wish. The main part, of course, will be a very, very large and we hope rapidly growing set of dynamically generated maps with many data layers. They include all kinds of things from world thematic maps such as soils, vegetation, climate, earthquake epicenters, etc.; U.S. demographic data; street-level data, care of GDT for Europe and the U.S.; and a number of additional datasets. The way we've organized it so that we don't overwhelm users with a huge list of themes, especially as this grows, is that as the user is coming in on maps and panning across, there will be one button among several for "choose a theme", and the list of the themes you get will be appropriate to that area of coverage and scale. That may still pose problems as we grow the resource, but we are working as hard as we can to have a scalable but simple and intuitive interface.
There are other features - for instance, users will be able to save maps and customize them to an extent - to add point features and labels and things, to email maps to friends, etc. As I mentioned, this is to us just the start and we hope quite rapidly over the next months and years, pending little details like money and stuff, to be able to add lots of additional data, served up not just from the Society and ESRI servers, but ideally served up from hosts all around the nation and the globe. We are already under discussion with Tim Foresman of NASA and people at USGS, NIMA, NOAA, etc. about participating in this - EPA is another one. And again, in the weeks and months after launch, we hope to do a lot more than link to those sites but to directly integrate maps and datasets from those third-party sites. We also want to add new functionalities. Right at the launch, as you might guess, it's going to be a choice of viewing this data layer or that data layer, and as soon as we can embrace the upcoming standards from the OGC web mapping testbed - it is our hope that we will be one of the first commercial users of that new technology because that is really what the new vision is here - to allow anybody to do at least a simple sort of spatial analysis that has in the past has been limited to professional GIS users to a large extent. And then we want to take this core capability and expand it in various ways with spin-off features. Lots and lots of educational resources, for example, so school kids - rather than being faced with this blizzard of maps and only a vague clue of what to do with them - can actually be given educational games and curriculum-related exercises, lesson plans for teachers etc. to make it a much more usable and accessible resource. Lots of other additional possibilities, but one we are particularly excited about is to create as a large subset of this atlas what we are calling a global conservation mapping center as part of an upcoming conservation initiative by the Society, so that this ideally would become the place for conservation groups around the nation and around the world to make their map data accessible, either directly integrated or linked to this site for use by their fellow groups and, of course, by a very large public.
So, as far as the conclusions go, it is just the beginning. I will be grateful when we are there because the next two weeks are going to be kind of hellish. But it is the beginning. After launch we will be looking more aggressively for content partners. We're looking for funding - we are in the process of courting corporate support and we'll be looking for foundation funding as well. We will be applying e-commerce models to this, toward the goal of making it self-supporting, but right now it's very much a mission activity of the Society. The goal here is to diffuse geographic knowledge and to provide access, not just to our maps and to our products, but to all of these fascinating but sometimes distressingly isolated and sometimes overlapping efforts here and there. We are following with great interest the national atlas project and, of course, Digital Earth. The last thing we want to do is compete with those efforts. The thing we'd like to do is provide them with thousands - millions - of eyeballs so that we can all benefit by creating this vast and interlinked resource that is accessible to all.
Thanks.