Project Vision

What MapStory is All About

MapStory.org is the free atlas of change that everyone can edit. We are a community, not a company, working to organize humanity’s shared knowledge about how the world evolves geographically over time, and to make this knowledge easily accessible as an open educational resource.

The MapStory community’s work breaks down into four big tasks. We call them the “4 Cs”. First, once you’ve created a profile, you can collect spatio-temporal data and import it. We call each dataset imported into MapStory.org a “StoryLayer”. Second you can compose MapStories that provide nuanced understanding of historical change by combining StoryLayers and other narrative elements, like images, text, or video. Third, you can curate the accuracy and quality of content presented in MapStory.org by adding ratings, checking metadata, making comments and committing version edits to the actual StoryLayers themselves, much like you might edit a Wikipedia page. Finally you can convey the content (StoryLayers and MapStories) you create to a world of viewers either on MapStory.org or as embeds on other sites on the web.

Where We've Been

The MapStory effort was started in April, 2012 by Dr. Christopher Tucker. A political scientist by training, Chris believed everything in the world "happens somewhere at some time" and imagined a community driven atlas where all that we know or believe about what has happened on Earth could be mapped over time.

In his original blog post about the project, Chris describes the vision this way:

If this thing goes right, MapStory will serve as a new dimension to the global data commons that enables everyone on earth to organize and share what they know about their world spatially and temporally, instead of encyclopedically the way Wikipedia allows. This data (what we call StoryLayers) will be shared with the world under a Creative Commons license, and perhaps someday we will have the technology to make them editable by the crowd the way a wiki works. Also, (again, if things go right) MapStory will empower people to publish their narratives (what we call MapStories) atop this data to a global audience. A global megaphone by which everyone can tell their stories about the world.

A prototype of the MapStory site was launched at the 2012 Foss4g North America conference. Here's a Direction's Magazine review of the soft launch: "MapStory Soft Launches".

A non-profit organization, MapStory Foundation, was set up to govern the project and ongoing partnerships with OpenGeo (now Boundless Geo), Arizona State University Decision Theatre, among others, were formed to support technical development and testing for the platform.

In October, 2014 the Atlantic Magazine published a review of MapStory, dubbing it One Mapping Service to Rule Them All.

Technical tickets from the prototype platform are archived in the MapStory-Meta repo.

In 2015 funding was secured to undergo a complete re-engineering of the platform, specifically focused on integrating "community editing" for layers, as was always envisioned, and on improving the storytelling and overall user experience. The Roadmap governing the rebuild is available here and technical tickets for the rebuild are here

Where We Are Now

Where We Are Going