Motivation The Meta Google Maps “Hack”.pdfVIP

The Meta Google Maps “Hack” Petros Efstathopoulos, Mike Mammarella, Alex Warth University of California, Los Angeles {pefstath,mikem,awarth}@ Motivation Since the advent of Google Maps, a slew of developers have built systems which use information from other sources to produce composite maps showing the locations of various items. These systems are commonly referred to as “Google Maps Hacks” due to the fact that they were originally created before Google published the API for creating these systems. The example system we will be considering throughout this paper is one which shows the locations of movie theaters on a map, given a ZIP code. Since the publication of the Google Maps API, even more applications built around this interesting framework have surfaced on the internet. All of these applications have several properties in common: they fetch their data from somewhere on the internet, they process it in some way (perhaps parsing it out of some human-readable format), they combine it with new formatting, and finally they display it on the map. In addition, since the Google Maps API deals only with raw coordinates, all these systems must perform “geocoding” to convert the addresses into (latitude, longitude) pairs. All this is a lot of work even for seasoned programmers, and a fair amount of it is nearly identical for each such application. Additionally, any time the Google Maps API changes (which it has on several occasions), all of the existing systems break until they are manually updated. Finally, there is no way that a general internet user can accomplish it without first learning a great deal of programming. Our goal is to create a system that can automate the generation of many simple “Google Maps Hacks.” No