You might have seen the documentary series “Britain from Above” (if not, go check out its excellent website). It showed us some beautiful computer generated visualisations of GPS data overlayed on a satelite map of great britain.

Director Cassain Harrison explained how he had surprisingly little trouble getting access to these sources after he asked politely. Now, I wonder, how many of those sources can we find online? A little Googling gave almost all of them, to a degree:

– Ships as they sail through the english channel (Live!)

– Taxi’s and deliverytrucks as they drive around (Live!)

– Airplanes as they fly overhead (live!)

– People as they do their thing (live!)

Get them into Google Earth or processing and you’re not far off.

But there’s so much more. If it can move, someone has probably GPS tracked it. A little Googeling will get you far, and there are numerous easy solutions to do your own tracking.

And you don’t have to overlay these tracks on (Google’s) satelite imagery, there are a staggering amount of opensource mapping systems available. Heck, you can run your own maps server if you want, and even make that available to other people’s mapping mashups, or even their GPS devices. Perhaps someone could start one where the earth is a huge ball of brightly coloured candy, I’d love to drive around on that.

Perhaps it’s my bias, but I see so many interesting map-based projects that I have a hard time subscribing to the idea that services such as Google Maps are ‘atrophying’ and narrowing our idea of what maps are. Even though Google Maps is mostly used for mundane wayfinding tasks, I greatly enjoy the incredibly amount of creativity and beauty that has so far come out of this mapping boom, Intentionaly or unintentionaly.

So, Britain from above was great. Gimme more!