WorldMap is a web platform for creating, displaying, analyzing, and searching spatial data and other data forms across multiple disciplines. WorldMap is a collaboratively edited, multilingual, free internet mapping electronic media site open to everyone that is housed at the Center for Geographic Analysis at Harvard University and accessible at the WorldMap website makes it possible for those who are not experts in GIS and web mapping to explore, visualize, and share their research materials in a GIS spatial framework, enhancing their ability to conduct academic research, community service projects, and instructional activities. The WorldMap site allows users to add their own map layers and data sets, symbolize them, edit them, add overlays, add multimedia content (images, video, text), control access, and share or publish them. The purposes of WorldMap are simple: to enable one to explore the development of human civilization in all its diversity and complexity in spatial data contexts, to take advantage of the knowledge of others to enhance one's particular interests, and to create a sustainable and scalable platform in which students, scholars, organizations, and ordinary citizens can participate in creating and sharing any work that can be usefully represented spatially.
Overview Worldmap is an open-source and open access online platform for visualizing and sharing spatial data. Worldmap was launched in July 2011 by the Center for Geographic Analysis at Harvard University. The site was created following the success of the AfricaMap project here, that launched in beta version in November 2009 to bring together a range of cross-disciplinary materials on Africa, within an online mapping environment. AfricaMap demonstrated that there is a large amount of detailed mapping data on Africa that can be brought together in one place, that web technologies are mature enough to be able to handle a large volume of data (hundreds of gigabytes in this case), and that users can explore these data smoothly on top of high resolution imagery such as Google satellite view. WorldMap, in which AfricaMap is now located, has data that range from detailed street maps, to language and ethnicity groupings, historic and scholarly maps, environment, transportation systems, World Census and other demographic and economic data, political systems, institutions and infrastructure, urban planning, archaeology, cultural sites, crisis areas, and health and disease. AfricaMap also includes data from the Ibrahim Index of African Governance that allows users to display and analyze results along with other data. A searchable gazetteer in AfricaMap includes over 2 million place names readable in a multiplicity of languages. From the outset, collaborations with other institutions interested in the potentials of the AfricaMap (and WorldMap) platform were sought. These encouraged the creation of new data and in some cases, direct links to other sites were employed to display of these data spatially in concert with additional data layers. These collaborations include, among others, the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database at Emory University, the UNESCO World Heritage Sites, and social crisis mapping such as Ushahidi. In other cases, such as the ATLA Religion Database and the Human Relations Area Files at Yale University, associated data were first geo-referenced and then uploaded directly to the AfricaMap website. In still other cases available open source data were downloaded and entered into the system, as with a spatialized version of Wikipedia and various environmental and boundary data, or brought in from government and other sources, as in JapanMap which integrates detailed data on the 2005 tsunami among other things. As a result, users creating maps within the WorldMap system now are able to draw on an array of global and local mapping data already brought into the system – environmental (rivers, soils, climate, eco-systems), sociological (population density, administrative boundaries), cultural (language, religion, ethnicity), historical (early maps, period mapping, trade routes), transportation systems, and health (U.S. and U.N. global census surveys, among others). Data uploaded to WorldMap by users often are made available by them to other users, encouraging collaborations and cross-disciplinary engagements employing the same resource data. In short, WorldMap grows Wiki-style as new data are added, with the creators of these data retaining editorial control. WorldMap is being used by several organizations. The Institute of Advanced Studies at the United Nations University (the research arm of the U. N.) is addressing the illicit trade of flora and fauna in East Africa. A Newsweek/The Daily Beast project, “Get on the Map! For Women and Girls, is promoting Women in the World. The Virtue Foundation is mapping Global Health Data at the local level in Ghana. A non-profit music support group, “The Singing Wells,” in Nairobi, Kenya is helping to preserve and share East African Music. Virtual Kenya also has created an instance of Worldmap on their own site to explore environmental issues. Cornell University’s College of Human Ecology, under epidemiologist Julia Finkelstein, is developing a new WorldMap instance called GlobalHealthMap, based on the current WorldMap system but also interoperable with it.
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