Maps for everyone & everything

Ever come across a quaint little shop (Raasta) while wandering an unknown area (Frazer Town) in a city and wanted to save the location to return later?

Or wished that there was a map of all women's restrooms on the Bangalore Coorg route (with information about how clean they are, if water is available and if they are safe...wishing for too much right? ) 

Or a map of walking trails around Bangalore where you can go and practice for Oxfam Trailwalker 2016

Or maybe a food map of Ahmedabad showing all the famous street food shops, curated by people living in Ahmedabad?

Or struggled to find your parked car in the myriad bylanes of Koramangla (hoping it hasn't been towed), and wished there was a way to mark its location on a map so you could find it easily later.

Or stuck in a jam because of a BMTC bus breakdown during rush hour and wished there was a way to share this with all the others coming behind you (so that they would take a different route and make your life easier.. ;-) )

And wished that you could do this with same ease that you post to Facebook or Tweet from your phone?

Today’s mapping applications are very much geared towards showing you the way, towards roads, and traffic. Maps are tools to guide you to a place, to find a place maybe, but they should also be a medium to explore, and a medium for future reference. They do all of the above but in bits and pieces, and none of them make it easy. For e.g. Google Map maker lets you add you own locations which get added to the central Google Maps after review, but its not easy. Waze lets you track the traffic, but that's it.

Frankly like Instagram is about pictures and Zomato is about food, there is nothing about maps!

So how about a Social Mapping application, which provides a private map, on which you can mark your current location with all the detail you want to go with it. So you can mark where you parked your car, or the location of that shop, or that shortcut route you took to office.

And also be able to mark the clean toilet you found on a public ‘Sulabh Shauchalaya’ map, or mark that bus brakedown on the ‘Current Traffic Hindrances’ map, or mark that awesome vadapav wala you found at the hidden corner in the ‘Ahmedabad food trail’ map.

What would be required of such an application?

The application will have three main aspects:

1. The maps – The layer on which everything is built.
2. The property – Anything which is marked on the map can be called a property
3. The mechanics – How to mark, maintenance rules et al

Maps

Maps will be the base layer on which everything is built. As I see it, every account holder gets at least one private map when their account is created. This is the map to which all properties are marked by default, and persist, irrespective of whether they are on any other map. This is account holders personal reference map.

Public maps are maps on which anyone can mark locations. This is how curated maps of things like food trails, public toilets et al will be created. And like Wikipedia, they should be maintainable by the public. There could be some authoring rules et al attached to such maps, but they should get maintained organically. Public maps are owned by an entity who has an account, but they are public because anyone can create, and in return view the properties on a public map. Details of lifecycle of the public map needs to be given some more thought.

All account holders can create multiple maps, Public or Private. As I see it, the maps are really just layers on top of each other.

Properties

Properties are the assets created on a particular location on the Map. It can be a (relatively, because nothing really is) permanent property such as a restaurant, an old tree, a community or a temporary situation based marker such as a traffic jam, a newly road being built, or the current location of pride of lions in GIR forest. Every property is created on at least one Private map, and has to live on at least one private map (not necessarily the one it was created on originally). A property can be private (default option) or public, the difference being that a private property will only stay on the private map it was created on but a public property can be added to any other private & public map for reference by others. Properties of course will have metadata, and ratings and all sorts of other properties.

The big unanswered question here is about the ownership of the property. Is the property owned by the creator on the map, and if so what happens when multiple people mark a property on their public / private map. Or can a property be owned by the real life owner, so for instance can a restaurant marked by random person on his personal map, be owned by the actual Restaurant Owner, in which the restaurant owner can delete the property and so does that mean that the property will get deleted from every private map. Again the question is really regarding the life cycle of the property. I don’t have an answer to this but think the answer will be in developing very good search functionality, which comes under the Mechanics of it all.

The Mechanics

The third important pillar of this app will be the mechanics. Things like how to mark, how to search, cleanup of public maps, persistence of properties et al. 

Marking a property has to be 1-touch (Mark location, open app to provide more details, like the Voice Recorder in the iPhone, but launched from the home screen). Why so, because if there are too many steps involved in marking a property, then users won't do it. Marking a property is actually a two step process, first is to mark the location, and second is to give the property details. Without the latter, former will make no sense. There will be some technical challenges with the above though, because marking a property in 1 or 2 step means that your location is being tracked continuously and whether the mobile devices battery hold up to that is any ones guess.

Another very important aspect, especially to avoid duplication and keep the data clean, will be searchability or rather, search driven suggestions. So for example if I am at a location, and I mark it, before I give details of the property, I should get suggestions of the (public) properties already marked at that location. Thus I might just want to select one of those properties and give some more detail to it. In addition, another advanced, and algorithm driven back end feature could be the matching and merging of metadata provided by different users for the same property, but then this has to be dealt with really carefully.

There should also be a way to purge all or some properties at a given frequency. This applies to scenarios like ‘Traffic blockage maps’ or ‘where is the Pride in Gir forest map’. You can expect folks to mark properties, but surely not remove them. And if they do not remove such properties, they just create clutter and confusion. So there has to be a periodic purge method. How this gets applied, and who applies it (map owner vs system) needs more thought.

Gamification, Monetization, Verification of properties, Layering of maps et al are other aspects under which can be worked on.

So anyone up for it??!?