For this blog post I contributed to the open source maps as opposed to uploading my own map. After going through a few options I decided to fit a map based around the United Kingdom. While this might not have been ideal as I am less knowledgeable about the landmarks in this area, the final overlay turned out good. I found it surprising and intuitive to connect the two maps through points. Below is a image of my fitted map.
In the past I have taken classes which outlined the power of open-source and crowd sourced projects. This is an example of one done right. You do not need to have technical background nor knowledge of the original maps. The website it built intuitively such that anyone can figure out how to correctly fit the maps. This is ideal as it allows the crowd sourced project to be completed and contributed to by anyone.
After completing the map I explored the different options given to complete the process. I thought that the ability to clip the map was an important component. For many of the maps there is a large portion of margin and non-geographic material. By being allowed to clip the map you can create an overlay which displays the necessary information such as titles and axis without a large amount of dead space. Without this feature, when viewing he maps overlaid with on another, many portions of the current map are covered the fitted graphic.
While there are many benefits to this crowd-source project there are some potential issues. Because anyone can contribute it’s possible people will submit bad overlay data. Once submitted it does notify the user the map is under review, meaning there is still workers who have to verify the correctness of the maps. Even then, this is not a prefect process and ill-made maps can still be saved and published. While this might not happen a lot, it means that some people might be turned off from the resource not all of the data is garenteed to be correct.
This is a good way to get a lot of data very quickly but should not be used in every scenario. If the overlay is an integral part of research or will be viewed often, it would be better to create the overlays yourself to ensure correctness. On top of this, it would be wise to spot check correctness when ever a map is pulled from this source as there is no guarantee for it to be correct.
