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By Jon Noring

EarthIn a prior TeleRead blog article, I addressed digital annotation. But what about annotating life itself — human activity? After all, in a general sense there’s little difference between a digital object and something associated with a time and place.

I ask this question since for over a year I’ve been pondering an idea, along with my friends James Linden, Eric Jacobs and David Rothman, of developing a public and free “GPS Repository.” This GPS repository is intended to be a central place where people submit GPS/time coordinates, some commentary and some metadata (and maybe even multimedia such as digital images), associated with noteworthy events they’ve experienced. Of course, it could also be used to record historical events.

For example, the event could be earth-shattering such as 9-11, or some personally rewarding experience such as encountering an unusual plant or animal while out on a hike in the local park. Or, having a great (or terrible) meal at a particular restaurant (the GPS coordinates could even point to a restaurant booth having a unique carving in the table top, such as I encountered when I visited the Rogue Brewery Pub in Newport, Oregon!) Even scientists, researchers, and others working in an official capacity, could use the general system to store, retrieve, and mine the time/place data.

Now imagine millions and eventually billions of ordinary people (as well as organizations) daily recording and annotating seminal events (important to them), and all that data available to the public at the touch of a finger — ready for them to search through and filter the data as they desire. As I pondered all the things that could be done with the data my mind began to swim — even outlining all the possible uses that I thought of (which would probably be only the tip of a very large iceberg) would make this article as long as a book!

The important point is that the open standard used to “digitally annotate life” can be, and should be, the same standard used to annotate digital objects. After all, with a digital object, a digital address is given which points to the digital object. The digital address could just as well be GPS coordinates (or other location scheme when GPS coordinates are not available) and date/time, pointing to some “object” in space and time.

Anyone interested in developing the digital repository to include annotations to both digital objects and real-world happenings, let me know. I have given a lot of thought, in essentially a global sense (but not at the gory “how do we implement it” technical level), to the requirements and feature-set of such a repository. And of course, I welcome your comments. Even though the repository must be free to all (to submit and to retrieve data), there are definitely business revenue models that would make this self-sustaining.

 
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