Introduction
D o you know where you are?

Do you know where you are going?

Could you find the nearest restaurant to your current location?

When you looked at your latest holiday photos, could you remember where you were?

It is just these sorts of questions that drove me to write this book. I’m interested in the answers

to all of these questions, and particularly in ways in which I can represent information about
my world, and the world we live in, in a way that relates that data to its location.

During the course of writing this book I visited New York (U.S.), Edinburgh (Scotland), and

Sorrento (Italy), in addition to many different places within a few miles of my home. In each

case, Google Maps and Google Earth could be used to record information about where I had

been, to look up information about where I was going, or simply to help me understand the

area I was visiting. All of these situations, and more, are documented and described within this

book