Interactive images vs. webGIS
Tuesday, October 23, 2007 at 3:33PM I came across an interesting interactive image depicting wildfire occurrences across the U.S. -- this one is hosted by the AP news service. I have seen a lot of images like this over the past year or so; maps turned interactive images depicting a wide variety of information, particularly in the climate change arena. I find it interesting because, using the above referenced image as an example, it basically covers the same information that is available via a wildfire webGIS (which, unfortunately, seems to be down right now - maybe that answers my question!) developed by a consortium of federal agencies (GeoMAC). Because the information is so redundant (and comes from the same data sources), it seems, to me, to raise questions about the accessibility of web-based mapping sites -- are they seemingly too complicated, or do they contain too much information that doesn't relate directly to a story? Certainly the image format is easier to deal with from a development standpoint, and can be made pretty a little more easily, and it may just be the news media focus on graphics for particular issues/stories, but I still think it is interesting to see, and to think about how web maps can be made more useful as information resources.
Reader Comments (4)
a good topic. when to add more "stuff" to a map. often, on mailing lists, i see people link to their own sites that are complex enough that i leave before i figure out how to use them. if a site that's written in software _that i use_ takes me too long to figure out, how is a completely new user going to react?
i think this is why it's best to use an extremely simple interface or google-maps (or openlayers) whenever possible: nearly everyone is familiar with the interface, you have to work pretty hard to add extra bells and whistles (so you see less superfluous "stuff").
also, technically speaking. that map is not just an image, it's a 2.4MB flash movie. but still. cool.
Nice topic and article