Residents of Italy’s capital will glimpse the future of urban mapmaking with the launch of “Wiki City Rome,” a project developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that uses data from cellphones and other wireless technology to illustrate the city’s pulse in real time.

And how will these residents get this glimpse of the future? Well, that would be on the big screen display in one of Rome’s main centers, as the project ties into “Real Time Rome,” which was presented during the 2006 Venice Architecture Biennale, the prestigious biannual exhibition of contemporary art. Alternatively, anyone with an Internet connection will be able to see a unique, up to the minute map of the Italian capital which includes the movement of the crowds, event locations, the real time positions of buses and trains, and even the where abouts (for now) of well known Roman personalities. The data, of course, is coming from the exact same places and people (anonymously for the most part, in case you were concerned).

This could be a really intriguing experiment on such a grand scale, and the groups that are coming together to make it happen include the MIT SENSEable City Lab, SEAT Pagine Gialle, Telecom Italia, Telespazio, the Rome public transportation authority ATAC, La Repubblica, and Trenitalia. Among the insights they hope to gain, MIT researcher Kristain Kloeckl offers:

“How do people react towards this new perspective on their own city while they are determining the city’s very own dynamic? How does having access to real-time data in the context of possible action alter the process of decision-making in how to go about different activities? These are among the questions we may be able to answer.”

These and many others – with privacy issues and tracking concerns first and foremost in many people’s minds. But done properly, such an offering could not be a valuable tool for everyone in the city to leverage, it could also be a “living” piece of art that provides a new perspective on our world today. As SENSEable director Carlos Ratti notes (using a lot of lingo I am quite comfortable with):

By deploying developments of the ‘Web 2.0′ and the ‘Semantic Web,’ Wiki City can be a significant leap forward towards a pervasive ‘internet of things’ to support human action and interaction.

To check out the wikicity data site, click here. The Web Urbanist also has an interesting post on this topic.