With Cambridge's concentration of network activity, it is hardly surprising that people have started to make local information available on the Internet. Several on-line city projects, of various flavours and with various kinds of information, have started, and one of these, is based here at CB1. But ours is one with a difference -- grand in its ambitions and flexible in its design, it is poised to spread, like the web itself, over the whole world. (Hey, why stop there? [Ed])
Obviously any plan to document the whole world to any level of detail is ambitious for any one author, and will work best as a collaborative project, with the co-operation of contributors from each area, and so, if you live or work in the Cambridge area and can write or edit web pages and similar files, we'd welcome your contributions -- mail us to let us know!
We plan to provide solid information of the kind that people would like to see (hence the importance of flexibility -- we're designing it to make it easy to add more kinds of information), and to make it easy to find. For us, content is what really matters, although we're working on some pleasing plans for the presentation (while being careful not to slow down the loading of pages too much -- any graphics will be simple and quick to load).
The core of the project is the road files -- one file per road, street and path of the city and its surrounds. On each road are links to descriptions of all the businesses and organizations along the road, and to the road files for the roads that connect with it, and up to the area containing the road, and so on.
Originally we were going to have the maps written in HTML directly, but then decided that we can do more with a very simple data file format (which, like HTML, can be edited in any text editor) from which we will generate the HTML files. Later, we will provide CGI scripts to generate special versions of the maps on the fly -- for example, listing all the shops that sell basic provisions and are open at a particular time of day or night. We have grander plans than this, too -- by putting the data in such a format, we can later generate VRML from the same data files to present a walk-through model of the streets, for example. To help our contributors, we provide details of the data file format. There are also a few notes on the technicalities of the implementation.
For many projects, documenting the world would start with ``Next, stop the world'', but we're going for ``Next stop, the world'' -- well, perhaps not immediately, and why stop anywhere anyway? With our road page format, we can obviously make the basic technology available to other cities... and then link the roads going out of the edge of one city into the other end of the same road arriving at the next city, and thus the project could be the start of a complete on-line road map for the whole country, and then, via pages for ferries, air-lines and tunnels, the rest of the world.
We've started a draft of the roadmap of the city, but haven't had the chance to fill much of it in yet... there is a Cambridge map by areas, and then you can click on an area to get a list of the roads and facilities in that area (except we haven't connected the roads into most of the areas yet); and we have started to make road files -- the best entry point is probably Mill Road since that is where we started (being located there ourselves). There are nearly a hundred roads in it, and they do connect to each other, so you can wander round quite a bit. But they haven't got any real content yet -- that's where contributors can... well, contribute.
We've made a nest of maps (still in the draft version only) -- unfortunately not all browsers can display this, so we list them separately below.
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Daniel Sturdy (proprietor)
Last modified: Fri Jan 10 16:51:08 1997