Local

About

MapStory Local is an initiative to map all of human settlement over time. Think google maps or openstreetmap, but where you can type in a year, see the way any part of the world was then, and animate it backwards and forwards.

Go to the Initiative on MapStory.

Lead

Nitin Gadia

Components

*Infrastructure *Land use *Boundaries *People (population density) *Places (placenames, linked with longitudinal gazetteer)

General approach

*Depth: Start with a complete mapstory of Ames, Iowa, USA including the political hierarchies it is in. *Breadth: Do basic MapStory of whole world, of basic political boundaries, settlements, human fossils and their founding or dates.

Styling

As with other mapping websites or applications, there will be multiple styles.

Simplify/add detail based on zoom level, as one sees in Google Maps or Openstreetmap. However, while those applications are transportation-centric and land is covered by how it is seen from above, for the primary Local style, land will be colored by land use, as listed below. *Settlement - show as dots/circles, with colors/sizes based on population size brackets. As user zooms in, detailed infrastructure appears. The option to add an isopleth population density layer can also be turned on, with an opacity slider. *Land use - colors or sets of colors for: urban, agriculture, timberland, non-human land (eg. grasslands, forests, wetlands, deserts, ice, water, etc).