The Indigenous Mapping Network and GOOGLE mapping 2010

Emerging mapping tools for Community Mapping

The reality for Māori in creating maps using GIS mapping tools is far from ideal. High and on-going costs for GIS software and associated hardware, the highly technical nature of training and operation plus the on-going costs of maintenance, put GIS mapping technologies out of reach for most Māori groups. However, Māori may well benefit from using the mapping tools provided by GOOGLE.

Māori could benefit immensely from the creation of maps especially given the availability and ease of access to modern mapping technologies such as Google Earth and Google Maps. As a highly mobile people, those Māori who live remotely from their ancestral homelands could find a way to connect and re-connect to their whenua, whakapapa and whanau using the global network and tools offered by Google mapping technologies

Google mapping technologies offers a way to connect Māori with the tools needed to protect, preserve, and enhance their way of life within their ancestral territories. It also offers Māori, who live remotely from their papa kāinga or whenua tipu, access to easy-to-use tools that would connect them to their homelands in a way that was heretofore impossible. Recognising the impact these tools could have it would be important that this type of endeavour would require an amalgamation of tikanga or traditional practices and protocols to guide the use and implementation of modern mapping technologies.

In February of 2010, the Indigenous Mapping Network in collaboration with Google hosted a geospatial and mobile technologies workshop entitled Indigenous Mapping Network-Google Tribal Geo Tech Workshop . Approximately seventy-five indigenous mapping community members, tribal leaders, technical developers, and mapping specialists attended from the U.S., British Columbia and Ontario, Canada, Peru; Ecuador and New Zealand for the two day training workshop. The training focussed on using android cell-phone-based geographic data collection, Google Maps and Google Earth.

Keeping the above concerns of indigenous communities before us, the Google workshop focussed on the technical aspects of using Google Earth, Google Maps, and Open Data Kit, among other technologies. Special emphasis was given to a number of key concerns including: privacy and security of and access to culturally sensitive data, mobile data collection, and data conversion from proprietary to open formats.

Training sessions for the first day were organised around two broad themes: the Community Track and the GIS and technical Track. The focus for the community tracked centred around creating maps with My Maps using a variety of media including photographs, videos and stories; embedding those maps into blogs or websites for publishing over the internet; converting to Google Maps and Earth from other formats; and issues surrounding security and confidentiality of data.

The GIS and technical track was more concerned with using and converting GIS data using third party tools to Google Map and Google Earth format. Security and confidentiality of data was also addressed.

The second day of training continued with the community track and the GIS track but adding a programming track. The community track continued with creating maps; this time creating content in Google Earth including adding points, lines and polygons plus other media including photos, slideshows and videos in pop-up balloons. In addition, creating a narrated tour of an Indigenous site; finally importing GPS data and GIS data into Google Earth.

The Programming track concentrated on coding and programming languages for building customised maps and included advanced KML, JavaScript programming, Google maps API and Google earth API.

The GIS track took a more in-depth look at tools for data conversion and manipulation.
Smart Phones and ODK

A special session was hosted introducing the use of android cell phones to facilitate community-based data collection. The android cell phones coupled with the Open Data Kit (ODK) software is an innovative approach to data collection. ODK is a suite of tools that allow users to collect their own data replacing paper forms of data collection. ODK Collect renders a form, survey or algorithm into a series of prompts that supports repeating questions and several languages. The forms are based on the JavaRosa Xforms which supports a variety of data types such as GPS location, text, photographs, audio, video and barcodes. Users work through the prompts to capture points and populate a database with coordinates, description of the site and images related to the site. The android platform is stacked with GPS and camera capabilities that allow the user to capture data via video, audio, and photographs. Once captured, data can be uploaded via a number of methods including GPRS, Wi-Fi, and by direct connection either by SD card or cable to a central server.

ODK streamlines data collection by replacing traditional paper survey, cameras, audio or tape recorders and GPS units with a single item; the android mobile cell-phone and a centralised web-based server.

In summary, the android cell phone coupled with ODK software allows users to collect data: users can take a photograph of a site, describe that site using text, obtain the GPS coordinates of the site, then upload that collection of data to a central server for off-line analysis at a later time or date. ODK aggregate provides a server repository which is currently implemented on Google’s App Engine, a free service where each user is responsible for their own data.

The Google Tech training provided a hands-on outdoor session using the Google android smart-phones loaded with ODK Collect to demonstrate the latest data collection methods available.




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