The landscape as database

The advent of smart phones equipped with GPS technologies and constant connection to the internet has fostered a suite of applications allowing developers and owners to associate data and information with physical locations. Longitudinal and latitudinal coordinates create instances of physical locations that then populate database for use by others to support navigation, addressing and mapping.
This chapter explores the conditions of the landscape as a database and the possibilities that this holds for reconfiguring both the representation of the landscape and the practices that can occur within it. A paradigm in which data points become the primary material that describes the landscape means that any ‘thing’ can become a landmark. Whilst we are used to buildings, monuments and trees having a datum, the streaming condition of cars, people, animals and all variety of objects within the internet of things, means that the landscape is no longer described through architectures with fixed points of longitude and latitude. Instead the landscape is a fluid, non-static database in which all and any correlations can be made to represent the landscape.
In support of their theoretical premise the authors present three funded research projects that introduce the application of geofences to moving things: people, buses, clouds and basemaps.