From GIS to Web Maps - Participatory Mapping: New Data, New Cartography - page 32

tools mainly for territory management. Moreover, it is not a
set of tools and techniques specific to online mapping
systems - led by Google Maps - that have made them more
successful than GIS and PPGIS, but their ability to facilitate
the participation of a very large number of people and their
adaptability to different uses:
What Google Maps lacks in richness and
analytical power and, indeed, accuracy, it makes
up for by being a platform for the addition of
value by a participating public, a service to be
mashed up, a system to be - possibly - rewired.
[MIL 06, p.193]
Nevertheless, the shift from a participatory GIS to an
online mapping system is not obvious for everyone. As part
of the community project for the development in the uses of
maps (the Humboldt Park Community GIS Project, 2003-
2010), Sarah Elwood [ELW 09] was able to analyze the
reasons for the choice of GIS over online maps. She observed
several reasons why the population rejected online maps.
These included the familiarity with GIS and having already
acquired the skills necessary to use the software; the
mistrust for online mapping applications which come from
Internet companies; the desire to keep the impact of GIS as
“expert technologies” [ELM 09, p.5] during the negotiations
with the city's institutions; and finally, the standardization
of online maps 8 . Crampton summarizes the criticisms from
geographers toward online mapping systems as follows:
Loss of privacy (e.g. through StreetView), issues
of censorship (Boulton 2009); homogenization of
maps (Wallace 2009); dumbing down of
mapping - making maps that are very basic or
lack richness (BBC 2008); contributing to the end
8 Sarah Elwood quotes that “all the maps look the same. Everybody knows
you made it with Google Maps, and anybody can do that.”