FortTours.com
FortTours.com Google Map Project - Mission Statement
The FortTours.com Google Map Project is an online educational tool that displays historical events in Frontier America in an interactive map format. The FortTours website provides an initial historical dataset, and Google Maps provides an open-source set of tools to integrate a JavaScript-based map in order to implement a easy-to-use platform for the production and display of geolocated historical datasets.
Big, technical sounding terminology to describe maps that provide a history lesson, one that users can access via mobile phones, GPS devices, computers, and other mediums not yet created. A user can save a FortTours.com map on their device, plan a trip, change the icons for the places they've visited and the locations they desire to visit, add notes, pictures, and videos, and send the data to a friend's phone or computer. We are unleashing the hidden power that is in FortTours.com; the actual geo-location co-ordinantes inside the Delorme Maps, with the historical import of the location, accompanied with an image.
With the newly added support for geo-location data in the Google APIs, we foresee an increase in contributions from mobile devices with GPS coordinates. By creating a tool that exploits these new data sets early, we hope to capitolize on these new features and explore how other tools will use our FortTours.com information.
Our project is aimed at providing an easy way for people to interact with information about the FortTours.com places that interest them, as well as share that information with their friends. People often browse the web and bookmark places of interest to them, but these bookmarks live in the browser, and are of little use when actually moving around town. Our system will provide an easy way to send locations of interest, along with a small note or comment, to a location-enabled service that will interact with the user’s mobile device. It will also provide an easy way for the user to view all of these “placemarks” at one time on one map, with FortTours.com the source of the information.
