Spatial Fusion

Adlets could add new information to a map. This could be a geographical map with species distributions, plants, birds, etc. New records could be incorporated onto the map. The new map should include information about who supplied the data. It is possible that the data added to the map would be part of a larger document that the adlet would want to capture, for example a document discussing the flowering times of the species. Therefore the system should be flexible enough to both add to a document and retrieve documents in their original form.

Maps could also be generated that did summary statistics. The end product might be frequency of records for an area, rather than just the records themselves. It is likely that this adlet function would bring together people that would not be in contact otherwise -- herbaria collections (such as libraries for preserved plant specimens), ecologists, amateur naturalists, conservation organizations. The researchers working on the plant genome project would also have a use for this kind of map building. Individual labs are working on getting the DNA sequences for different portions of the genome. Genetic material is arranged on chromosomes. So gene sequences can be placed in relation to each other by their physical locations. An adlet containing previous work on a species, could travel the web and add new sequences to the existing map.