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back to article Sir Isaac Newton's life rendered as KML

Forget biographies in conventional books. Forget e-books too, while you're at it. A pair of Italian boffins have mashed up the idea of “Georeferences” and an ancient Roman form of travel guide called itineraria to create Keyhole Markup Language (KML) tours of a notable person's life. A.C. Sparavigna and R. Marazzato, both of …

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  1. Jason Togneri

    Use some imagination

    Surely a more interesting use for this - particularly in historical studies - would be to map the progression of an historical event (skirmishes in a war, the movements of the Sarajevo assassin, the march of Garibaldi, etc) rather than the life of an individual, particularly if it is what that person DID, conceptually, which is important, more than where that person WAS at any given point in time?

    Cute idea though.

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  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Would be interesting to see all the travel activity of Mozart or Da Vinci

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    2. Francis Boyle Silver badge
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      Casanova

      would be more interesting. Does the resolution go down to individual house level?

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  3. greensun

    if they makes these for severl contemporenous people then cross reference them, we see who did meet ( and we already know about ) and, more interestingly, who might have met but that we weren't aware of.

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  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Big Brother app

    Make sure phone companies, Foursquare, Apple and Google etc keep all the location data from mobiles and apps of everyone ever. In the future one could have a map of everyone's movements tied to a timeline, perhaps with historical markers showing what was happening in various places. Once history notes who turned out to be important / infamous, we can see where they went and with whom they met.

    Of course 99.99% of the data would be a terrible invasion of privacy, but hey, it would make a neat app.

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  5. Alex Gollner
    Thumb Up

    Get on your bike to unlock content!

    It would be even better if it was very hard to see text and images locked to a given physical location, perhaps with encryption using public keys available from special wi-fi hotspots.

    This could work for fiction as well as 'documentary' KML...

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  6. Graham Bartlett
    Facepalm

    "Sir Isaac Newtown"

    I look forward to the same thing being done for John Milton Keynes.

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      1. dotdavid
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        Thumb Up

        Re: I think you meant...

        Whoosh ;-)

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      2. Graham Bartlett
        Reply Icon
        FAIL

        Re: I think you meant...

        I think I didn't, bcos I think I know about:-

        1) the name of the 20th-century economist;

        2) the name of the "new town";

        3) the name of the scientist after whom the laws of motion are named;

        4) the typo on the name of the scientist, which has now been removed from the article title but is still present in the body of the article;

        5) the fact that the whooshing noise you're hearing is a low-flying reference passing over your head at some outrageous speed.

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        1. dotdavid
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          Re: I think you meant...

          I was talking to the other Commentards, not you Graham.

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  7. arrbee

    At last, now we can find out how Wally got there.

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  8. T J
    FAIL

    OOOH GOODY!

    Cos the world desperately needs one more ML.

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