Degree Confluence Project

The Degree Confluence Project (DCP) was created by Alex Jarrett in 1996 aiming “providing an organized sampling of the world.” The word confluence is defined as “the exact spot where an integer degree of latitude and an integer degree of longitude meet
”, for example, 43º00’00”N 72º00’00”W. There are 64,442 confluences in the world, counting each pole as one intersection. Each confluence is further defined as primary confluence or secondary confluence. The precise definition could be found here: http://confluence.org/infoconf.php#types. A primary confluence, simply speaking, is a confluence from where discernable land could be seen on a clear day.

The collection contains photos, video, and text of contributors’ visits to confluences. Contributors are encouraged to revisit the confluences in order to document the changes at these locations over time. Until now, they’ve had 5327 successful primary confluences, 10425 visitors, and 72091 photographs in 177 countries.

Confluences are assigned to countries to facilitate browsing. Countries are listed on the homepage of the website and by clicking any one of them, one could get the general information of the country, some statistics of the visits to confluences in the country, a map of the country with all confluence in it, and a list of all confluences in the country with thumbnails and the degree of the confluence. One can access the confluence by clicking the confluence on the map or in the list.

In terms of search, one can (1) search a specific confluence with its degree; (2) search a visitor by first name, last name, or both which will return all the confluences he/she has visited; (3) let Google search the site; (4) search confluences using combination of multiple queries, such as rang of degrees, altitude, primary/secondary.

Each visited confluence has the information including the visitor, the date of visit, text description of the experience of the visit, photos or video taken from the confluence. Text descriptions have been found in different languages with English translations. At least 4 photos facing north, east, south, and west are required for a successful visit, and at most 10 are allowed to post. No precise video requirement could be found.

The meta date of each confluence includes the country it is in, maps of the country, the nearest town to it, the link to the antipode, and a small global which allows users to move to the confluences one degree toward 8 directions (north, northeast, east, southeast, south, southwest, west, northwest) to the current confluence.

To me, the whole website is pretty awesome as an all volunteer supported one. I am thinking about several ways to improve it though. First, the visit to the confluence could be organized in terms of the season when it was visited. One could easily figure out the season of the visit since the date of the visit is always posted. However, if there are categories of seasons, users could find, for example, all visits in spring to different confluences. Second, tagging could be used for photos, facilitating a bottom up search function based on the terms visitors assign to the photos they take. By doing this, users could find pictures meeting their specific requirements, for example, all pictures of forests.