Haiku are created based on what is in the place you choose: shops, subway stops, many or few people...
"The same coffee pot / Feeling good in Malaga / Up in the trees". This is the poem that Open Street Maps Haiku throws out when it knows my location. Makes sense? Let's see: I'm having a cup of tea, surrounded by trees, and I feel quite well in this province. You could say that the application has succeeded. But how?
“We automate the creation of haikus about places”, they explain from OpenStreetMap Haiku. “If we observe all the aspects that surround a specific point, we can generate a poem about any place in the world. The result is sometimes funny, often weird, most of the time pretty terrible. Also probably horrible for haikus purists (sorry)."
You can try it too: enter their website, click on 'Locate me' (bottom left) and observe what does this artificial intelligence say about your coordinates . In the port of Malaga, for example, he recites: “The ferry is late once again. Waiting for the bus. Machine noise. It's not too far off either.
“The original inspiration for all this is a project called every thing every time, by Naho Matsuda. His work aims to create 'impractical poetry' from a variety of data streams and sensors across the city: air quality, traffic, work shift schedules, mosque prayers, etc."
A composition on the gardens of El Retiro, in Madrid
"The result is shown in real time on the streets of the city. We have always been very fascinated by the project, which, when it came out, seemed a refreshing, slightly cheeky take on the whole 'smart cities' theme ”, continues the development team.
Thus, in OpenStreetMap Haiku, the verses are randomly joined by collecting information about a place. This information comes directly from OpenStreetMap, a free application, to which anyone can contribute data. Your goal is reflect everything that exists on the planet using labels linked to its basic structures.
For example, All airways are classified, and within them, it is specified if we are talking about a tram, a cable car, a chairlift... In the case of entertainment venues, they can be fast food restaurants, ice cream parlors, coffee shops... and so on.
They explain it to us from the poems app: “For example, if a supermarket is near the center of the map (because an object has a label store = supermarket), it would randomly produce one of the following verses: 'Cabbage and carrots salad', 'The cashier is bored', 'A lonely corridor', etc. If there is a swimming pool (the program reads the label leisure = swimming pool), it could say: 'It smells like chlorine.
Words for a walk in Florence
By the way, you can add new verses yourself! (yes, in English). The program also takes into account the weather and the time it is and, above all, it is a great access point to OpenStreetMap.
“We think we have created a small window, maybe not to the world, but to the world of OpenStreetMap. OpenStreetMap is a revolutionary project, it is the most complete map of the world ever created. This is an idea that is generally best understood when we list its big numbers: five million users, five billion nodes, three million changes a day, 100 million different tags, etc. "
"We think this can and should be expressed in a more sensible way and with a pinch of randomness, doing what an OSM contributor does: stop and look around ”, conclude the creators.
Words for a walk in Florence