Collaborative Cartography

When I think about Collaborative Cartography I think about a collection of ideas to support one main focus. For example, our combined efforts and thoughts on the atlas pages is a great example of Collaborative Cartography. I like how we can post our own thoughts and ideas and people will comment back on how it can be made better or something that is a really good idea. This is sort of like writing a paper and editing that paper using a lot of people to improve it. Over the course of the semester we have participated in an ongoing assignment on our blog sites. This also is a collection of ideas and it to offers a great resource to find out more about others ideas in various cartographic topics. All of this has helped improve the thought process of everyone and it was cool to see others ideas that i did not think about. Basically with collaborative cartography you are tackling the problem from all angles and that helps delete discrepancies.

Mapping Nevada

With the technology that exists today mapping and mapping Nevada have endless possibilities. People have mapped out the road sytems of Nevada. People have mapped the railroads. the mountainous terrain has even been mapped. One area of mapping Nevada still is under the radar and that is the caves of Nevada. there are not many known maps of the underground. I think it would be interesting to make a complete index with full maps of each of the known caves in the state of Nevada. Using todays technology we could have 3-dimensional models of each cave and also paper maps that are complete and accurate. Although cavers are very secretive about the exact locations of caves this would be a great collection for licenced caving clubs to have. This type of map could incorporate google earth pro and could have a flyby over nevada to each of the cave locations. What would be really cool would be fly thoughs of each cave. It would be similar to google pro fly overs. I have become very interested in three dimensional fly overs and fly throughs during this class and this might be something to pursue as a project in the coming semesters.

Virtual Worlds

After spending about two hours on Celestia doing flyby's through the universe i began to think about the geographical applications. This program has a lot of potential in that we soon will be able to see what distant planets look like with great detail. This program offers a lot to everybody. Like myself people can get lost in the universe and never find planet earth again as i did. I had to type in go to Earth and i took a good couple of minutes for the computer to ttravel back to Earth. It was amazing to me that there is a computer program that has much of the entire universe mapped out and named. Each star or planet that i went to had a name. As technology improves we will be able to look at other planets like we look at planet through Google Earth. Space is the final frontier and with the technology of telescope satelites we will be able to explore deep into any galaxcy. Using this kind of technology makes you wonder what the next level will be like.