![]() ![]() ![]() In February 2005, however, the field was revolutionised with the introduction of Google Maps ( 2010) closely followed by its applications programming interface (API) in June of that year that let users embed their own varieties of Google Map within their own web pages. A good example in the United Kingdom is ‘UpMyStreet’ that was first created in 1998 and now contains a wealth of local information targeted around the search for property and local services (UpMyStreet 2010). By the late 1990s, various products that enabled users to ‘find their way’ – gazetteers and atlases – had appeared such as MapQuest ( 2010) and in the early 2000s, value was being added to these interfaces as they began to be customised to provide new layers of spatial data that users could query. Map applications appeared almost immediately, first as backcloths on which to display locational information. Right from its inception in 1992, the great innovation of the web was to communicate and disseminate graphical information. In conclusion, we speculate on what all this might mean for GIS software and geographic information science. We then point to extensions to other graphical media, to 3D, to virtual worlds and beyond. To ground this presentation in applications, we explore some classic exemplars from our own and related work with map mashups and portals such as MapTube ( ). We follow this by introducing the key issues of creating spatial data for mashups through crowd-sourcing. We then discuss the need for standards and formats, moving on to questions of security, privacy and confidentiality. First we suggest the need for a typology of map mashups while arguing that such a typology is premature. This heralded a new kind of geography called ‘Neogeography’ in which non-expert users were able to exploit the power of maps without requiring the expertise traditionally associated, in the geographic world, with cartography and geographic information science, and, in computer science, with data structures and graphics programming. Mashups, composed of mixing different types of software and data, first appeared in 2004 and ‘map mashups’ quickly became the most popular forms of this software blending.
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