About this pres

• Is online: berk.es/mapping-fission (git.webschuur.com/placebazaar/mapping-fission)
• Uses the word Blockchain only once ☚
• Uses the word Decentralised over Distributed, because Distribution means something different with mapping data.

About me

• Bèr berkes Kessels
• berkes (berkes.eth, mastodon, keybase, github and that birdsite)
• Founder of placebazaar
• Blog on berk.es
• Mail on ber@berk.es

we’ll cover

• Problems with mapping
• Current solutions for mapping
• What can decentralisation offer?
• Deeper dive into one such solution: peermaps/ipfs.

Problems

Maps are expensive to make.

They require local knowledge. Feet on the ground.

Maps are always outdated.

The moment you publish a worldwide map, thousands of things have been moved, renamed, replaced, closed, opened and so on.

Maps are political and strategical.

Lots of pieces on a map are undebatable facts.

There is a park bench at X,Y.

Maps are also debatable.

This city is part of China/Israel/Thailand/Belgium

Maps are often strategical

• Here’s a military base with N parking spots.
  
• This is where all the speed camera’s are.
  
• Here you can cross the border easily.

To summarise

• are hard and expensive to make and maintain.
• require local knowledge.
• are politically motivated and censored.
• are the last thing to put inside one monopolist.

Maps are the most important visualisation of data.

When did you last use a map.

Centralisation

Centralisation enables censorship

Hampered by commercial interest

… The ‘Wikipedia Of Maps’ Came To The Rescue

Enables privacy infringements

Google knows:

Google Location services, and the “free” google maps app, are the biggest trojan horse. Deployed only to get the most valuable metadata about you.

Centralisation

• Easy to censor.
• Dependent on interest of central publisher.
• Runs on users’ data (privacy)
• Monopoly.
• etc. The usual.

Current mapping

• Google Maps
• Open Street Maps
• A bazillion GIS providers

example

There is mapping data.

• Lots of it is open data.
• Lots can be bought or licensed.
• But it is spread all over.
• And always in flux.

Solution

• Decentralised collection of mapping data
• Decentralised publication of mapping data
• Entities and orgs glueing, and mixing all that data

Current Options

• Google Business/maps
• Apple Maps
• Bing Maps
• Open Street Map

Future options: Collection

• FOAM
• StreetCred.
• OSMand Live (Bitcoin Payments)
• Scamcoins galore
• Vaporware (including PlaceBazaar)

Future options: Distribution

• Peermaps
• Bittorrent
• IPFS

• Streaming

GTFS example

Dynamics of mapping data

1. Geography: continents, mountains, lakes
2. Physical structure: Roads, bridges, location of cities
3. Political: Boundaries, borders
4. Metadata: Speed limits, turn restrictions, park benches, restaurant
5. Logistics: traffic, transport

Obstacles

• Collection of data is complex.
• Data is continuously updating.
• Data is HUGE.

Data is never “finished”. Or 100% dependable.

Data is everywhere (but unfindable).

example { target=_blank }

Standards

Standards: just one example

Mixing, Mashing and Merging is a problem.

Decentralised

Just because it is possible to build distributed systems does not necessarily mean that it is a good idea. — Andrew S. Tanenbaum in Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms

Solutions by centralising

• Weekly/Nightly imports: just rebuild the database.
• Event stream, handle changesets. example live updates

Solutions by centralising

• Central Quality Assurance (tools)
• Validation by crowd
• Effort orchestration
• Standards enforcement and -emergence.

Solutions through decentralisation

Breaking Monopolies?

• There’s enough data. Open and Free.
• Data gathering of map-data is decentralised by nature.
• (Well there’s satellite and AI).
• We need more interfaces around existing datasets. The read-side is not distributed.

Breaking Censorship?

• On the read-side.
• Developers need more options (than Google maps).
• Developers need easier access to datasets.
• PlaceBazaar is building a PoC OpenOpeningsTijden; a business directory

Taking back ownership?

• Any personal location data must be owned by users.
• Any other data must be open data.

What can the decentralisation-movement do?

Make apps.

(and make them privacy-first)

Use apps.

OSMand, Maps.me, Or one of the 160+ android or 126 iOS apps using open data maps.

Use free mapping tools

• Display maps: Leaflet, OpenLayers
• In apps: Mapbox SDK, Skobbler, Nutitek, and many more
• Run your own tileserver: Mapnik and many more.
• Tune your own routing: GraphHopper, OpenTripPlanner, Brouter, Openrouteservice
• And more usages

Release open data (yay! even more data)

Peermaps

example: luxembourg

Storage

R-tree

Code.

ssh kind-jefferys.webschuur.com
peermaps data 6.3281,49.4440,6.6800,49.6160 | bat

diff -u <(peermaps files 6.3281,49.4440,6.6800,49.6160) <(peermaps files 6.3281,49.0,6.6800,49.6160)


peermaps data 6.3281,49.4440,6.6800,49.6160 | grep "fuel"

peermaps data 5.4080,49.4137,7.5641,50.2235 | grep "fuel"