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10-21-16, 01:57 PM   #4
Tesser
A Deviate Faerie Dragon
Join Date: Oct 2016
Posts: 15
I love stuff like this.

First of all, any talk of mapping information would be remiss without this classic essay by the founder of modern American engineering:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/...-think/303881/

Second, you are asking a lot of your authors. There would have to be a universal, intuitive system available for people to map their content.

The 'table of contents' is a very robust, flexible system that has stood the test of time.

The modern equivalent (as prophesied in the essay) seems to be hyperlinks. Tim Berners Lee was thinking of just that when he invented html with it's traceable links.

Basically what I'm saying is you're absolutely right, but the devil's in the details, and in this case those details are <html> and <xml>.

*EDIT* I will add that your crowd-sourcing idea is pretty cool, for generating static maps of each book. That's the "brute force" approach but plop it on a platform like Amazon and it might just work. You might find a more willing audience by adding a 'map' section to Wikipedia's book entries.

*EDIT* as someone who likes to brainstorm about information, you might also be interested in my sort of 'imgur alternative', very very clunky still but as a concept : okonno.com/projects/depict It's like imgur but you can drag images on, draw and type on it. Collaborators welcome

Last edited by Tesser : 10-21-16 at 02:07 PM.
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