FOAM Map: Token Curated Registries for Geographic Points of Interest
***The FOAM Token Curated Registry (TCR) is built with the Crypto-Spatial Coordinate (CSC) standard to form a registry that enables the blockchain to act as an index of spatial contracts and, by extension, allow spatial contracts to be queried and displayed on the Spatial Index Visualizer. CSCs and TCRs together with token economics make a powerful combination for a new form of mapping and maintaining what are known as Points of Interest (POI).***
FOAM is launching a consensus driven map of the world, meant to be censorship resistant, serve as a single source of truth and be interacted with based off of crypto-economic incentives and rewards. This post is written to serve as a preview of the TCR front end and highlight some of our design decisions. This preview is not comprehensive and more information about the application will be released in subsequent posts. In the TCR, the registry is not displayed as a single ordered list, but rendered visually and spatially on a map. A map is essentially a registry, fundamentally, a map is a visual and spatial curated list of places or points worth remembering.
Most paper maps never had enough space to label every “place”. Instead, they labeled a selection of an area’s most interesting and important places, calling them “Points of Interest” (or “POIs” for short).
Today, with digital maps and Zoom capabilities, all Points of Interest can be accounted for. Currently on a map like Google for example, Point of Interest data is filtered and ranked by zoom level based on popularity and other proprietary ranking algorithms. Place labels are subject to design constraints, such as not being too close together, overlap and be large enough to be legible.
Further, different maps such as Google and Apple display and rank PoI data differently. In ‘Cartography Comparison’ it was found that Google favors displaying Transportation points where Apple favors Landmarks and Hospitals above all else. Each map presents its own view of the world based on the ranking mechanism utilized.
Cartographers and Points that have been added to the FOAM map can influence and alter the visibility of Points on the map by increasing or decreasing the amount staked.
In the FOAM TCR ranking plays an important role and is determined by the amount of tokens staked within a Point of Interest once added to the registry. Like Google Maps, this ranking is global on the highest zoom level, but as you zoom in to a particular region, city, town and finally city block, the ranking is defined relative to the other points within the view port of that zoom level.
To date the only Token Curated Registry that is live on the Ethereum mainnet is the adChain Registry, which sets out to provide advertisers with a list of websites that offer high quality inventory for serving digital ads. As a launching off point for our User Experience research we investigated the adChain user flow to identify components that would translate to a spatial TCR. The elements highlighted in Green we found to be necessary to keep, Yellow are elements that need to be re-worked and elements highlighted Red we determined were not needed. The important thing to keep in mind is that the adChain registry is displayed as a list, which impacts the front end design and is why the adChain interface appears similar to an analytics interface. This is perfectly suitable for the advertising use case but not for a consensus driven map of the world.
The remainder of the post will be focused on previewing different user flows of the FOAM Token Curated Registry for Static Proof of Location.
In this first scenario a user is creating a new Point of Interest to be added to the map. The steps are to select the location of the Point, add the necessary metadata about the location and enter the amount of tokens that will be staked on the point. Once the transaction has confirmed the Point has become a candidate to be on the registry. During this application period, the validity of the point can be challenged by Cartographers curating the map.
The FOAM TCR Map displays Points of Interest in three possible stages. Blue points are candidates waiting out the application period, which can at any time be challenged. Red points are points that have been challenged and are currently under voting by token holders. Green points are verified, have already been through the application process and are approved as a valid point to be on the map. These points can be challenged at any time as well. The Map allows filtering by the stage of the points as well as by metadata tags.
Since the FOAM TCR is rendered spatially on the map, users will be spending a majority of their time consuming geo data. Because of this, we found it important to design a modular dashboard that does not remove the user from the mapping experience but builds on top of it in a piecewise fashion depending on the actions needed.
Within the dashboard, a user is able to track their Task Queue of Points and the current status. From the dashboard a user can determine the status of all Points they have interacted with as well as take actions such as initiate a challenge. The Task Queue allows voting on active challenges and well as the initiation of challenges.
Further information about the FOAM MainNet launch and features of the application will be posted in a follow up blog post. For more information about the architecture of the TCR and Spatial Index Visualizer see:
Disclaimer: All Cartographers should be mindful that the FOAM Token exists to provide functionality with respect to the FOAM TCR only at launch, which is intended to provide Proof of Location functionality for static objects.
At launch, FOAM token holders can become Cartographers and can contribute to their locality and interests by curating, mapping and verifying the locations of static objects. As the FOAM network grows and Cartographers begin to fully explore and map the world, once the FOAM network is sufficiently expanded, FOAM token holders may decide to contribute to the network in a dynamic manner.
Use of FOAM in connection with Static Proof of Location will require active participation and staking by FOAM holders as Cartographers, as described more fully in our Whitepaper. When participating as Cartographers, FOAM holders may lose their staked FOAM if the Point of Interest location information they provide is deemed incorrect, as determined by the voting mechanism described in our Whitepaper.
