Who Was That Masked Man Anyway?

During a discussion at the PLAN conference someone came up with the phrase "consensus based location" to describe the anywhereblogs / GeoNotes del.icio.us-for-places way of naming to fix location.

I wish I'd said it.

I misremembered the phrase today as "consensus defined location", which is not as good, so I'm grateful to Tom Carden, who writes the Random Etc weblog, for making a note of it.

[I did wonder later if the mysterious hombre who came up with the phrase was taking the piss, and meant to suggest that "consensus based location" was some woolly, tree hugging nonsense, but I don't care, it's too good to let slip.]

[[ I now know that the man who came up with the phrase was Alasdair Turner. He's put some more in the comments, and Mauro Cherubini's Weblog has the first questions about how far it works.

One of the many things I like about "consensus based location" is that it's a nice, slightly subversive play on "location based services".]]

Comments

[Alasdair Turner]

I suppose I should come out of the shadows. I was the one who said "consensus based location", and I certainly wasn't taking the piss. I am intrigued by personal / social concepts of what space and place are. As you rightly said in your presentation, we tend to know where we are. I don't want to sound too prententious, but it seems that a place is located somewhere within the collective conscious conception of it (and much like any network of overlapping representations, I don't believe we could ever pin down 'where' a place is through a precisely defined bounding polyhedron). So, when you gave your presentation, I was impressed not only that someone seemed to thing along the same sort of lines, but (unlike me) had actually gone and done some research on it. As I was idly scribbling, thinking of Wikipedia, the words "consensus based location" co-located themselves on the page...