Having a few thoughts here

SimpleSam06

I have a fair interest in the paranormal, or unusual, difficult to explain occurences and the like. It occurred to me that it might be of value to correlate everyone's experiences into a single area, a website. Like google maps crossed with the venerable fortean times. You could upload whatever you wanted to and map it, sightings or events could be categorised by time, location, authenticity (number of witnesses, reporting in media etc), so if someone wanted to find out "ghost sightings in wherever", or "ufo sightings during the summer periods 06 to 10", they could specify that.

Building up a pattern of these over time and with the kind of data correlation we can manage today with computers could lead to some very interesting results. What do you all think, or does this already exist somewhere, or what would you like to see put into an effort like this?

greenkittie

Pretty cool idea do it.

6th

My own site Spectral Sightings is an attempted to do that with ghost/spirit sightings/reports from around Ireland though I need to put more time into it.

If you mean on a worldwide scale then you'd need to have a fair bit of time on your hands to manage a site like that!

SimpleSam06

6th wrote:

My own site Spectral Sightings is an attempted to do that with ghost/spirit sightings/reports from around Ireland though I need to put more time into it.

If you mean on a worldwide scale then you'd need to have a fair bit of time on your hands to manage a site like that!

Ahhh yes, yeezus, that one in Dublin looks terrifying, with the violent activity at a building in Belcamp college. You wouldn't catch me going within five miles of the place! :eek: Thats not one bit funny. Nice site though!

...Make that ten miles...

I was thinking on a worldwide scale, actually, the maps are already out there, all that would be needed would be to overlay a database on it and a user interface. A big worry I would have would be that it might attract enormous amounts of attention from people who hadn't witnessed anything in particular, but were a bit unstable, shall we say. That would dilute the value of the information and lead to incorrect trends and patterns. Especially in third world countries where recognised medical ailments (like epilepsy) might get passed off as posession.

Trying to provide as accurate and authentic a picture as possible would be the hard part in all this. Once the basic structure is in place, it would pretty much fill itself up! I would hope anyway.

Edit: It would be twice as hard, now that my pondering hat is on, because the vast majority of such occurences would only have been witnessed by lone individuals. Maybe it might be best to just leave it as a free for all... of course that would leave the door open for any kids that wanted to vandalise the thing... hrmm...

SimpleSam06

Authorised investigators of some sort?

Ziycon

6th wrote:

My own site Spectral Sightings is an attempted to do that with ghost/spirit sightings/reports from around Ireland though I need to put more time into it.

If you mean on a worldwide scale then you'd need to have a fair bit of time on your hands to manage a site like that!

You wouldnt need that much time to maintain it, as you can create a site that looks after itself in a sense. The hardest part is making the site but once done, keep it to organisations and investigaters to upload data, they have to login, make it free and researchers/investigaters will use it!

Quite simple to implement!

6th

I'd imagine it would get spammed to bits if it ran itself (not that I know about these thing ) and aswell it would be very easy to abuse.

Its a great idea and its definately needed.

Ziycon

You can easily stop the whole spamming and abuse by have a login, but each group/individual that signs up has to be accepted as a member so you would restrict it to organisations and known researchers/investigaters, not just anybody!

SimpleSam06

Ziycon wrote:

You can easily stop the whole spamming and abuse by have a login, but each group/individual that signs up has to be accepted as a member so you would restrict it to organisations and known researchers/investigaters, not just anybody!

Hmmm... Well the only way spam would really affect it would be if the general public got to see the spam. You could have "authenticity levels", where recognised experts, large groups of people all reporting the same thing independently, etc would be at level 10, say, and wandering trolls would be at level 0, with a default map view of level 3 or 4, so you only see that level or higher.

That still doesn't deal with the problem of lone individuals who have real experiences however. How would you put them to a higher level where they belong, unless you were rooting through every single submission? And even then its a judgement call...