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.

Google Maps Ranking of Points of Interest are displayed by Zoom Level

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.

PoI data between Google and Apple Maps at the same Zoom Level Source: ‘Cartography Comparison’

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.

TCR Interface ~ publisher.adchain.com

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.