If you're fascinated by maps and digital cartography and haven't done so yet, do check out OpenStreetMap! It's competitive to Bing, HERE, etc. but everything is open, and the data is yours to play with.
There are projects based on OSM for routing, geo search, map editing, etc. that are also free. Definitely a lot of room for both programmers and non-programmers to contribute.
Also, OSM allowed the amazing initiative of http://hotosm.org/ to be built -- a website where contributors from around the world help humanitarian organizations by adding data into OSM for various areas where people are in grave need (e.g. finding houses of people in drought areas in Africa) based on satellite & aerial imagery. I tried this, and really couldn't walk away much too far into the night, can get addicting... also I think it's something similar to analyzing photos from spy satellites during WWII, only for 100% good case! For more details, see:
"From the beginning of OpenStreetMap it was anticipated that open, free map data would be a tremendous benefit for humanitarian aid and economic development. The idea was proved during the Haiti earthquake in 2010. HOT was incorporated in the immediate aftermath, August 2010, as a U.S. nonprofit and became a registered 501(c)3 charitable organization in 2013. Anyone is welcome to contribute to the HOT mission via our Tasking Manager - all you need is an OpenStreetMap Username. We ask only that you try to uphold the same code of conduct as our members, see our HOT Membership Code."
Surprisingly for me, quite many important buildings can be discovered without local knowledge (i.e. without "being there physically"), purely based on aerial imagery and a specially crafted guide. See e.g. the following link, with some hints and clues on how to recognize a school for a current (urgent!) pre-typhoon task http://tasks.hotosm.org/project/804:
If anyone wants to contribute, the online tool is really accessible and drive-by contributions (e.g. sub 10 minute) are totally fine: http://tasks.hotosm.org/
HOT arose spontanously from the Haitian earthquake. OSMers wanted to do something about the earthquake, so started mapping. Then people realised that something very useful had been created, so it was formalised into HOT.
I can second that.
https://www.mapbox.com is a particularly notable technology on top of OSM.
Initially I wanted to use Google maps with some customs styles but found their styling options pretty limited. Even worse it's too unreliable in China and there's no way around it. I used mapbox to easily create a nice map that incorporated our branding and then http://leafletjs.com/ to add interactivity on top of it. Very happy with it.
I'm curious if you would know how to do this. I'm in the states and I would like to improve my local maps. I'm a complete newb to mapping and OSM. What I'd like to know is, what's the best way to link addresses and coordinates? Are there public databases? There are new office building and subdivisions that are not yet in OSM and I'd like to help do that. I just don't have time to enter all of them manually, so if there's a way to automate that...
The best way for a "complete newb" to improve OpenStreetMap is to just find the place that you are interested in and click on "Edit" and start drawing the missing features.
There are public datasets and imports that happen sometimes, but these are done by people who have experience in it, and usually in cooperation with the local government GIS that controls the dataset.
Going outside and recording what you see is still the gold standard for collecting data. Don't feel like you have to fix everything in your city - if you can write down a little bit every time you go out and then come back home and enter it in using the map editor, that's very valuable.
I did this the other day. A stream nearby has been given a new meandering path. I went out with a phone and some GPS tracking software, traced it and then mapped it.
What you're talking about is "imports". OSMers are wary of them. It's possible for someone to mess up existing data, to add bad data, damage the local community etc. Most of the map in the USA was imported in late 2007 ( http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/TIGER ). The map looks done, but the data quality is pretty poor.
Hi, you should also look into checking to see if there is a MapTime http://maptime.io/ near you. MapTimes have sprung up all over the world and are a great way to learn about mapping and OSM.
> Definitely a lot of room for both programmers and non-programmers to contribute.
As an engineer-developer hybrid, I found OSM mightily helpful when pulling midwest town data and running tornado strike simulations. I encourage contributors to look beyond the roads -- other infrastructure such as power lines or towers are rare to find in the data but can be extremely useful.
Do you know if OSM is any good at geocoding for US addresses? We're currently using Google, but we're often bumping into the 2,500/day ceiling, and the commercial license is $10k/year.
We have looked at some alternatives such as geocod.io, but quality seems a bit lacking and they don't offer some features we need (but which we would surely be able to develop ourselves if we could use OSM as a primary database).
It is not. Coverage is poor. At high zooms the main tiles at openstreetmap.org will show addresses, so you can go to a random place and see that there aren't any. Some areas are pretty complete (look at NYC), but there are many major cities with basically 0 addresses.
How accurate do you need? I have had great success in putting a proxy in place before your call out to Google to cache, remove addresses you don't think will geocode, and geocoding addresses you're happy with via free-sources first...
Unfortunately it does not return the bounds of the matched feature. We use this to determine if results are accurate enough, by measuring the area of the bounds; for example, if the match is a long road (not a numbered street address), it makes no sense to use the latlng because it's quite obviously too imprecise; but if the road is quite short (less than 100m, say), it's acceptable to us. It's such an obvious feature to provide a geocoding API that I don't know why only Google does it.
I'm one of the Geocod.io founders. I'm very interested in hearing about the features you're looking for and discuss data quality. Feel free to reach out here or at hello@geocod.io
I've had a great experience with Apple Maps, which are based in part on Open Street Map (giving data back too) and TomTom. I've found it's accurate enough to just trust it, and it's excellent at detecting and rerouting when I can't do what it wanted me to (eg: traffic in the way, or I just miss the turn.)
It depends on the city. In Melbourne, Australia for example I find Google Maps to be less accurate than Apple Maps. I also found the same in parts of Tokyo.
It's also great in Switzerland. And got improved in Serbia. Great for Austria, Italy and Germany. Europe is not that bad. For me way better than Google maps (especially for car navigation)
That is not true, Apple map is better than Google's in China, better than Baidu at navigation even. It uses a local map provider's (amap.com) data of course.
This is a very detailed article. Most people do not appreciate how much work is put into building these digital maps, so it is great to see these kinds of articles.
While not as detailed, for contrast I want to post how Nokia's HERE maps builds their maps.
That is from the company blog. It shows a couple of our tools, but not nearly all. I work for HERE maps and my opinion is my own.
I just thought that people might be interested in how other companies like HERE build maps. Despite all the automation (at both google and HERE), it is still a human intensive process and there are people on the other end making it as correct as can be. Also, I can't go beyond what is written on the public blog as I am not a company spokesperson.
I can't imagine the amount of ambiguity that comes up in every day conversation when the name of your project/division is "here". Do you have internal language that's used to avoid such ambiguity?
I used to work for a company called "Going". We had no alternative internal code name. (I swear, if I heard one more pun about where I was "going"...)
That being said, you'd be surprised how little you need to refer to your own company by name internally, especially in an ambiguous manner. Usually its just "Hey, can you put this up on the site?" or "It would be cool if the product did X."
Google Map's data keeps getting better and better, they now have lane warnings (e.g. "right two lanes," etc) and traffic warnings with the offering to re-route (if they can find a quicker route). Although Google Map constantly offering to re-route me onto a slower route is a little odd (e.g. "want to re-route? It will be a 5 minute longer trip!").
That all being said, while Google Maps as a data source is amazing, Google Maps as an app and or web-site has a lot to be desired. Up until a few versions ago they had a way to add "My Places" but no way to actually access those places from the app (what?!). They have no search history (still, today), they do have suggestions but they are just somewhat useful, they have no compass (got removed), plus they went all "minimalist" and hide all the UI elements (and removed things like offline maps, for nearly a year).
I've actually been forced to stop using Google Maps as GPS as the app keeps closing during navigation and when re-opened it has "forgotten" what I was navigating to or previously searched for. So now I am forced, mid-journey to exit the freeway just to re-open Google Maps, re-search for my destination, and then re-start navigation just hoping it won't re-close-randomly before I get there...
It doesn't crash. It just closes. It is just gone. Like "poof." Then of course the phone goes into standby as nothing is keeping the screen on. At least if it had search history the situation MIGHT be recoverable, but nope...
Although Google Map constantly offering to re-route me onto a slower route is a little odd (e.g. "want to re-route? It will be a 5 minute longer trip!").
I think the point of this is to be reassuring: "Hmm... I wonder if it would be faster if I took a right here to get around this backup? Ah, Google says no."
That's increasingly important as the live traffic data gets better and it's worthwhile to use navigation to pick one of several routes you already know.
Google is still not perfect in this regard, but I'm certain my batting average at being able to "beat" its recommended route to a frequent destination has been trending down for some time.
Yep, that's how I've always used/interpreted this same feature. I know the various different routes I could potentially take, and knowing Google has already calculated they're slower makes me feel better about the one I'm actually on. :)
TomTom gives the, admittedly less informative, but similarly reassuring message, "You're still on the fastest route." My level of trust has grown toward not needing this reassurance. I will further admit that this learning process was a bit jarring, realizing what I thought was the quickest (or even "straightest") route was often mistaken. It's apparently quite easy to confuse "good enough" with "optimum".
But, sometimes I just go to Bing because I know it will load fast and I can scroll around super fast, too. Scrolling around in Google maps is always slow. It's like they are loading way too much stuff. All the 3D buildings...useless.
Agreed, they've added so much functionality to the desktop site that you can't simply search for an address without huge overhead. google earth is cool but the typical user doesn't need to load topographical details and 3d buildings when landing on the home page for maps...
I agree completely, there are so many great features I think they could have added instead of changing the interface.
1.) Send directions to a mobile device. There are many times where I search for directions or map out an alternate route on my desktop. The only way I can access those directions is to email it to myself then open the email on the mobile device. Why not just store the data and let the user retrieve it on their mobile device?
2.) Better accuracy of property in rural/suburban areas. It's odd to say this but Bing Maps is actually much more accurate in rural areas.
3.) More fine grained control over street view placement.
4.) Offline maps! Not everywhere has good cell coverage.
Offline maps never really went away, but they did get harder to manage. Type "OK maps" in the search bar to cache the visible area (it saves several zoom levels). Apparently with the newest version there's another method: http://www.cnet.com/how-to/how-to-use-google-maps-offline-on...
Agreed on the apparent deprecation of social/offline features, but the navigation does seem to be getting better.
Google Maps' offline feature is a bit misleading. You can't search or get directions without an internet connection. Although, if you are already navigating and the connection drops and you have the maps offline it would continue to navigate you.
However, your starred items do remain even while offline. So for travelling without data, given some planning time, you can star a bunch of stuff while you have wifi, and then navigate using the offline map without search.
I've tried many other solutions, and this really was the simplest and best for me.
Yeah. How is this not a thing?! I imagine a lot of people search for things on their desktop and then want to "push" it to their phone for navigation, but yet I have to re-enter the zip into the phone to do so.
If you're logged in on both devices the search history is shared and you'll see the last destination you searched for on your desktop at the top of the list when you open Google Maps on your mobile.
I actually tried that, it's kind of hacky and is not well integrated with google maps or android. Also, if your phone is off or the screen is locked for a few minutes it doesn't work.
I've been using Chrome to Phone pretty much every day for the past couple of years, for this and other stuff. You look up a route, click the button, the link is sent to your phone, you click on it, it opens up in Maps. Then it works the same as if you manually enter the route query on your mobile device.
I'm not sure how the could integrate it more (or even less) with Maps or Android or what the phone being off or locked has got to do with it. It syncs the same way all Google services do. I suppose it may be working less well on an older or oddly (manufacturer) customized device.
Better integration would work by allowing users to save routes on google maps. Those same routes would show in your list of saved routes on the google maps app, possibly with a cached offline version of the route on your cellphone.
What irks me the most is that it almost never displays the names for the horizontal streets until you zoom in really really close. It drives me crazy sometimes. Turning the map 90 degree doesn't seem to fix this either which is really weird.
I've had a similar issue occur several times in the past month. The app doesn't close, it just stops providing navigation instructions. The worst part is that it fails silently, and it seems to be related to poor cell service. It was a little scary when I realized what had happened, as I was driving on icy roads in an unfamiliar area at night. A notification that navigation has stopped would have saved me time and headache.
I'm also not a fan of how it changes your route without telling you. I intentionally selected a routed that took major highways, but after stopping for gas the app changed my route to a shorter (by distance) trip that was on small, poorly maintained roads through rural areas (with very poor cell coverage). When combined with the navigation silently failing in poor cell coverage, this has made for a very poor user experience.
An odd thing is that if I've searched for something on Google Maps on the laptop and then open their phone app I only have to type one letter and then the name pops up of what I'd searched so there's evidently some sort of history, just not very well implemented. Another funny glitch I had with driving directions is it quite often says 'turn left' about 4 seconds after you have passed the turning which is not quite as it should be. I sometimes switch to Apple Maps of all things though I don't think their traffic info is as good.
At least on iOS, there is. It even syncs with your history on the desktop maps.google.com so if you looked something up on your computer, it's right there.
wait, am I crazy? As soon as I touch the search bar in the mobile app the search history is right there. Someone below mentions "send to mobile" from the desktop, but searches from desktop google maps also show up in that search history.
You do need to turn it on originally, but I believe that option is also fairly prominent...
I worked as a contractor in Kirkland on this project for about a year.
Just for context, the first image with the red and green dots--- each dot represents a 360-degree "street view" image. While consumers only get half-a-dozen a block, the operators got access to all of them. (Green are HD, red are normal def.) It was really useful for verifying that businesses had closed because the streetview dots also had the exact time that they were taken.
There was also deeplinking in Atlas to a specific dot and direction vector. So when I was submitting a change to a business, I could link to the exact sign that I saw to prove that "Mama's Teriyaki is on _that_ corner", which helped whoever QA'd my change.
It was a great first job out of college given that my degree wasn't very relevant to anything. (A lot of my coworkers in the same spot--- young, a degree that wasn't too useful, trying to find anything to do.) Out of the 400 contractors in that first Kirkland "class", I see tons of them around the Seattle tech industry now. It's been a surprisingly good network to have.
At the end of the day it was still data-entry / data-validation, and mind-numbingly boring.
This is actually very fascinating. About how many businesses a day would an average person versus a prolific or slow person manage to update? Did you mostly work off of business signs to determine information about businesses? What if no recent pictures had been taken?
We'd also use the internet and, reluctantly, call them. We would identify ourselves as google maps, calling for info about their business.
I don't quite remember the numbers, but it was something like 40 a day? The slower and new peeps would be around 25, and the fast people could do like 80 a day. But there weren't any productivity bonuses besides not being let go, so me and my buddies would do about 10% more than the average and then goof off on the internet or do homework for our python night class.
Can you use the Atlas tool to correct business and other E/POIs (establishment/points of interest), or is limited to roads and other base map data? How do they evaluate spam POIs (say, locksmiths, who are prolific on Maps) in comparison to other Maps RAP (Report a problems)? Do all the teams (Places Listing Editors, Map Maker Google Reviewers, Maps Editors, etc.) use the same Atlas tool, or do they all have different tools? I use MM (Map Maker) quite a bit, and I'm curious how Google's tools work in comparison. Thanks.
Yup, you can change those things in Atlas. The "GroundTruth:Local" team did our best to accurately have 6 points of data: name, address, phone, url, business category, and pinpoint on the map. Atlas also had history for POIs, so you could see history from other operators. We wouldn't just use streetview, we'd also search for websites and, if we had to, call the business itself.
The Local team used Atlas, as well as the GroundTruth road-placement team, and the QA teams. There were different map layers and controls you could bring up.
Business category was funny because it had the most subjectivity to it. There was also a team in Hyderabad (that wouldn't make phone calls), and I once got into a dispute about whether "Olive Garden" is an American restaurant or an italian restaurant. :D
Yup, so part of the Atlas history for a POI is seeing problems that people have submitted onto a listing. When I was doing this a few years ago we had a humongous backlog of user feedback, but I'm under the impression now that they're mostly up to date.
Spammers were a huge problem. For businesses that don't want to advertise their brick-and-motor (a locksmith comes to you, not you to a locksmith) the policy was that they'd get one POI at the center of the city or zipcode they operated in. You'd think that locksmiths are bad, but florists are worse. Florists! They sell flowers to people! Horrible spammers. They also like to make fraudulent listings--- so they'll make a listing for "Competitor's Flowers" but have the phone number go to their business "Evil Flowers LLC".
There seems to be a huge difference in the quality of teams that use Atlas. For example, I've submitted reports on thousands (ex-hobby of mine) of spam locksmith listings over the years via Maps RAP and MM Report this. The MM team would readily remove spam, whereas the Local team wouldn't, even though the POIs were clearly spammy (special characters in the name). I've also coordinated with other maps users, and it seems the consensus is is that Local team will protect claimed listings at all costs, even to the point of hiding addresses for spam SABs (service area businesses) when they should just be removed altogether. If a spam POI is in the middle of a lake, or has weird characters in the name to evade the spam filters, wouldn't that raise some alarm bells somewhere? Do they have any standards or guidelines for evaluating the spammiess of a POI? Local seems to be engaged in an aggressive turf war with other teams, like Map Maker to protect their listings. Many edits that I've made to benign POIs within MM have been denied by LEs, only to be later accepted and corrected by GRs. Can you comment on the differences in quality among the respective teams, and their methods for evaluating edits? And why are they so determined to keep SABs out of the MM listings, especially considering the many of the SABs are spam, and use virtual offices, PO boxes, and unrelated business addresses (McDonalds, etc.), and, at least in the US, have to be licensed for business (and the business license address itself is a matter of public record? The reason given was that they wanted to protect the privacy of the business owner, but businesses have virtually no privacy (and no one used MM to find businesses except to edit them). SABs used to be visible in MM, now they're not. The "new" Maps RAP is terrible at reporting issues beyond just the basics. Reporting spam with the Maps RAP is a chore and almost better suited to MM.
Regarding florists, they're bad, completely agree. I weeded out a few mega-spam networks a few years ago before I gave up and focused on locksmith spammers. Garage door suppliers, handymen, carpet cleaners, movers, escorts, and lawyers! Lawyers are pretty bad, especially the ambulance chasers/accident attorneys.
I totally agree, and yes please answer these questions, as I'd be interested to know the differences in quality among the respective teams, their methods for evaluating edits and how they perceive each other.
Right now you can use Google Maps on your phone to add a missing place. This place will be approved (usually within an hour) by an Anonymous account bearing the "G" logo. Now while the POI may not display unless you are actively searching for the place or it's specific category, it will still appear on the map. This makes it even easier to crowd the map with useless information. I am sure it's an insult to those who painstakingly edit the map in MM with accurate information, only to be denied be an LE who knows nothing, and then seeing the useless entries like people's houses and spam get added immediately. What is Google's reasoning behind this?
I can't really answer the question with any insider knowledge, but from experience working with the Map Maker product and Google reviewers (those are the ones with G), they use a contracting workforce for local that has little training and high turnover. The Google Reviewers on the Map Maker team usually have better training and retention, and have higher quality standards that they adhere to, but that may be my bias working with them (they are usually quicker to fix their mistakes, and they also QC the LE reviews, frequently (100%) overturning their reviews and approving your edit on MM if the LE denies your edit. It's very frustrating and almost bipolar.
It's all fairly easy to spam Google Maps from other avenues. I've seen bulk uploads of 100's of spam listings, the Google My Business product is also easily gamed, and the LEs don't appear to closely scrutinize locations in order to ensure that the business is where it's claimed to be, even though they have access to more detailed street view imagery and presumably can just Google it. Google in general, and LEs in particular, seem to have a policy of preserving all data, no matter how bad/spammy, and approving new POIs, even if the POI is of a questionable nature and isn't supported by the facts, which, again, points to a deficit in their training in being able to identify spam features for Maps. Once you know what spam is, it's fairly easy to identify, and the actual QC checks, primarily using government licensing databases and other resources, takes about 30 seconds or less to verify listings. The hard part, at least on my end, is removing it. Google loves to hang on to spam.
It's a bit disturbing that locksmiths, of all people, are exceptionally dishonest. Florists I can understand — their entire business depends on emotional manipulation.
(Though it makes me feel better about taking an angle grinder to my door when I lost my keys a few years ago.)
It isn't locksmiths, as a whole, who are dishonest, it's that there's an international organized crime ring that runs a majority of the locksmith ops in the US, Canada, UK, and other countries. They operate call centers here and abroad that route calls to contractors in the field, who are usually working (at least in the US) here illegally on tourist visas, and they charge several hundred dollars above market price to perform unlocks, and much more to sell and install counterfeit lock hardware, none of which their workforce is remotely qualified to actually carry out. Unless you know the locksmith, or know their shop, or can find a locksmith affiliated with ALOA, or use your insurance company's (example: AAA) list of approved locksmiths, it's wise to steer clear of any locksmith on Google affiliated products. Otherwise, you'll become a victim of their bait-and-switch schemes (which often run as "$15 unlock in 15 min." on Google AdWords). Same could be said for garage door suppliers, carpet cleaners, and handymen--they're all run by the same crime group, more or less, and have been honing their craft since the 1980's, when they got their start with the printed white and yellow pages before moving on to Google. I would start with Meni Agababayev of Run Local Locksmith, and David Peers of Dependable Locks, to find out more information.
(Incidentally, you made a wise choice.)
Similarly, local florists are great, but many of the florist ops on Google Maps are just resellers running out of a call center who tack on an extra fee for ordering the flowers for you.
Basically any business that is aimed at homeowners, but tends to be located away from residential areas, has a big inventive to create false locations.
I wrote that! Thanks for posting that. Here's a good article from an ex-Maps spammer, detailing how he used exploits in the Maps UI to hijack listings: http://valleywag.gawker.com/how-a-hacker-intercepted-fbi-and... Although that particular loophole is closed, there are still many ways to get spam listings on Maps.
Economic competition implies massive waste of effort. Not sharing work and ideas is one of them; others include the psychological/sociological effects of competition and pressure, and also all the resources poured into advertising (which itself does not particularly give us better products/services).
This isn't unique to Google Maps; the same goes for competing pharmaceutical companies, educational institutions, and everything else. Imagine if they were all cooperating rather than competing.
However there are also some benefits to competition. Notably, the impetus to take risks of private capital in order to build new things / try new ventures. Also, the presence of choice in the market (in this case, you can choose which maps you consider more reliable).
I'd love to see more exploration into economic systems involving cooperation and choice, instead of competition. Can we have independent organizations motivated to produce different-but-similar goods, while simultaneously sharing their efforts?
I'm not sure competition is always the best model. For certain things it works well, but for things like maps, I think everyone loses out if mapping data is locked in different commercial vendor silos rather than combined into a non-profit, shared single source.
Can you give examples of things that wouldn't, theoretically, be better if "combined into a non-profit, shared single source?"
The whole problem is the incentive to innovate diminishes greatly for non-profit, single sources for most products. Thus, we have capitalism and "different commercial vendor silos" for most things, including maps.
I think you are oversimplifying. After all, the map data isn't really the product here. But you are right the tricky thing would be to maintain an incentive structure.
Waving hands wildly: imagine a mapping database that was owned by the government, free to use for non-profit uses, and licenseable by corporate entities. Here's the twist though, the license fees are proportional to the government doing a certain amount of upkeep/improvement on the database, and you are free to provide the same work block instead of a fee. That way, if you can do it cheaper, it will save you money up front and if your competitor can't do that, it's a competitive advantage.
I haven't thought about this model carefully just pointing out it isn't necessarily as black and white as you suggest...
It's hard to imagine shared single source competitive sports teams which are more engaging than having multiple teams with (nearly) independent player pools.
It does happen at schools, say, where the players for each team in P.E. class are picked at random, but fans get engaged with the team identity and the individual players, and team abilities depend in part on long-term shared practice.
It's hard to believe that the space programs of the 1960s would have been better had the Soviet and U.S. programs joined forces for a single space program; also, obviously neither space program was based on the direct market forces of capitalism.
The military is also not run under a capitalistic basis, and the concept of "single source" for a NATO or UN force is meaningless. It's even a stretch to say that a combined US Army/Navy/Marine operation is a "single source" given the inter-service rivalries. I'm not convinced that a single world government with its own military would be better.
Walk out onto the street and a huge number of things you see will be public, because people have decided that's the best way to do things. Roads, police, emergency services, a lot of infrastructure... It's easy to forget what an enabler this is what with all the noise businesses make about themselves.
Can't understand the reasoning behind expecting a company to pour hundreds of millions of dollars and resources into something for free / no return at all.
That's where you got it all wrong; the same common sense argument could be used against using (and contributing to) open source software in companies, and yet the most successful open source softwares are supported by companies. The thing is, contrary to the common sense argument, there is value in not reinventing what others are already doing. That's also a great way to find technical talents who have first-hand knowledge of the tools you use.
OSM is very similar here: the data is openly reusable by anybody and any change benefits everyone.
There can be a good reason for not contributing and using OSM, and that would be because Maps is such a central product to Google that they don't want anything shared with anybody else (plus they already have a lot of data and are considered as the best in class, rightfully or not)
The trouble is that the cost/benefit tradeoff of open source vary massively between types of software and data. A few open source projects have been hugely successful, attracting contributions from many for-profit corporations. Many more are somewhere between useless and abandoned and sorta-kinda useful if you're willing to tolerate various bugs, quirks, and poor UI. The vast majority of all software written will never be open-sourced because of some combination of vertical target markets, the need to be tightly linked to other proprietary things, massive investment needed before it's usable, etc.
OSM is an interesting case. I would have thought that the sheer effort required to keep map data up to date across the world would make it severely impractical to have open map data. They seem to be doing a decent job plugging away, but I don't have any data on how good they are at getting really accurate data and keeping up to date with ever-changing road conditions.
The parent and great-grandparent haven't proposed seizing private property, they're just noticing and drawing attention to waste. The observation is that if we could align incentives such that Bing, Google, OSM, Apple, etc were all investing aggressively into the same map data then everyone would be better off.
Maybe we can't! Capitalism is pretty damn good at some problems, optimal even. But it's not flawless, and it is worth noticing and thinking about places where gains appear to be possible.
> Because once you get the incentives correctly aligned it's a massive boost in global wealth?
The way you get the incentives correctly aligned is to make sure that the people making the decision (i.e., the company building the service) gets reward commensurate with the social utility, such that it is in their rational self-interest to do the socially-useful thing.
At which point, they are no longer doing it without compensation.
I already know about that. I think you misunderstood my point. If the poster was satisfied with the current solution then he wouldn't be pining for his wish. I was addressing the generalization. People often wish that company X would donate their efforts
Remember the Yellow Pages[tm]? It was a free product that made a huge amount of money by charging businesses to be included/advertised. Google Maps is the new Yellow Pages. "Let your fingers do the walking."
Many GPSes have "live google" functionality. I have one that allowed me to search for the nearest gas station or restaurant while on the road. There is huge value to Google from that.
I read the parent's post not as reasoning or arguing for a specific policy, but simply observing one of the flaws of capitalism.
Capitalism is doing much better than the other existing systems at solving the massive coordination problems of a large modern society. However, we can also tell that it is imperfect and involves some clear examples of wasted effort. Noticing this waste is valuable, even if no one has a good solution at the moment to improve on the existing system.
What's the alternative? Should we just assume that our current economic system has an optimal set of incentives that we could not improve upon?
Its been said that Maps is likely Google's most expensive product to maintain. Just think about the scope of driving every road in the world as often as possible.
It will only be replaced by OSM if OSM gets to be better than Maps on its own.
OSM's already better than Google Maps in many ways - walking and cycling data, detail in several European countries, and so on. And the beauty of it is that it's paid for by the volunteer effort of its contributors.
What Google has is massive amounts of raw data. The street information may be time consuming but is still trivial from a mapping point of view, and is often done better elsewhere. But StreetView has amazing potential and is inaccessible for analysis outside of Google. APIs are great but we need raw data!
You might want to have a look at Mapillary (which is a crowd sourced StreetView-alternative). Depending on the location the quality can be quite okay and some places have images where StreetView does not have any. All the images are under a CC license.
https://www.mapillary.com/
In the pre-Ground Truth days, Google Maps in SF used to think you could take a right from northeastboound Market street onto the 101 onramp, which is both obviously the best route for a wide variety of routes and also not actually allowed. The combination meant that many route plans didn't work.
In looking into getting it fixed I heard that the contract for getting the map data prevented Google from making any modifications to the map data. Apple Maps might be in a similar situation -- aware of the problem but with their hands tied. Map data has a lot of legal restrictions for reasons I don't really get.
The map companies probably want to make the customers dependent on continuing to get map data from them, rather than just using their map data as a 'base data set' to building their own, competing map data...
It doesn't ever seem to route on Broad St, though I think you're underestimating the severity of the 'appearance of the road geometry' for anyone who uses the Maps app to show a map rather than just following its directions.
If you want a bad case, ask for directions to the town of Langley, which is placed on the wrong island altogether.
In the car, I generally alternate between Google Maps, Apple Maps, TomTom and Navigon. After years of doing this, I've rarely noticed a difference in route accuracy -- in my experience they're equally likely to give a slightly faulty route, and there are better than 50/50 odds that a flaw will be shared across apps.
TomTom seems to be the winner with realtime traffic data accuracy, besting Google, and Google beats Apple, although not by much.
Google has lead in POI info, but that lead has diminished to the point of irrelevancy in the last year. Apple and Navigon have the best visuals. Google has the most naturally conversational voice guidance. And while those are nice, I still tend to prefer TomTom's accurate traffic data.
I think Apple gets the short end of the stick in these deals. The company that provides that mapping data usually has ridiculous restrictions on what you can/can't do to the data (even possibly disallowing your own patches), and Apple takes all the heat from users.
Apple has their name on the product, it's their responsibility to ensure it is up to par. It doesn't really matter who the fault lies with, if the data coming in isn't good enough then apple should be looking for different data sources.
Why wouldn't Apple take all the heat from users? Steve Jobs removed a very good map from everyone's iPhone and replaced it with a buggy Apple branded map. I don't care if it's the fault of some vendor, at the root of it Apple is to blame for shipping it.
I mean, don't you think that Apple deserves to take at least a little of the blame for this? If they can't negotiate a better deal with their data sources, find a better data source, or find a way to feed corrections back to their data source, that's on them.
They started Ground Truth when I was there and it really opened my eyes to just how "broken" a lot of map data sources were at the time. Something I considered to be a 'solved' problem (take aerial photograph, pull out streets, poof map!) was no where close to solved.
Some folks have said that Ingress, the Android and now iOS, real world geo game. Was in part an exercise in data collecting. Get people to photograph land marks in the real world to make "portals" while collecting GPS data associated with public landmarks for maps. And then use that data to localize things in satellite imagery, etc.
It's little wonder that Google Maps is such an amazing application given all the time, intelligence, resources and just the sheer commitment Google's shown to it.
I know business considerations are what they are and often independent from others, but nothing shook my belief in Apple's commitment to quality as a defining principle more than the decision to replace Google Maps with Apple's own half-baked beta offering. Does anyone think they'll ever give maps & cartography the kind of attention to detail that Google's given it?
The app may not be great, but it's pretty good, especially for the vast majority of users. From Google's perspective, I doubt it makes sense to add features that many of their users don't need and won't use.
I only need the "feature" that when it crashes, it should remember the route so as not to have to use (often missing) data connection in the middle of the trip. It's such a simple concept - save all routes for later recall, even if offline.
I think most interesting point is not covered in either of them: How much of this effort devoted towards human curation? The numbers are believed to be ~1100 full time employees and 6000 contract workers[1]. These are huge numbers compared to most competitors in the market. Assuming each correction to a map can take 15 mins on average, you can easily make 100,000 corrections a day. Again, assuming there are top 2000 cities in the world where most of the queries originates, this is about 100 corrections per city per day. This would guarantee Google maps best of the best freshness, precision and recall on most metrics. With about 10X-20X larger curation force plus algo engineering, likes of Apple or HERE have no chance. In a way this also shows Google's leadership wisdom. Maps are the most important thing on mobile and even on web. Most companies don't get this and provide minuscule budgets citing no potential revenues (for instance Ballmer cancelled Street View like effort at Microsoft). By the time they wake - if they wake up - it would be to only find that they have been outrun by such a huge gap that even a decade won't be enough to catch up.
difficult to imagine why apple would have even attempted to get into this space ... they must realize they can only be a second rate player. maybe that's good enough for them? doesn't fit with their story/ethos though
Setting aside how one views/classifies the companies, you don't have to assume anything: Google's maps have qualitatively better data than Apple's because they've literally been driving & photographing much of the world's roadways. Apple shows no indication of having this kind of commitment and even if they did, Google has a significant, years-ahead lead.
So your theory is that Google must have better data about what is in a specific place, and how to get there from somewhere else, because they have a photo of that place, from the street?
Well, according the featured article we're commenting on, yes, that's about half of it in a nutshell. The other half is the algorithms they're running on all this street view data they're collecting.
Is it really that crazy a notion that actually driving the roads and collecting all kinds of data from it yields higher accuracy maps than just licensing less robust data sets from others?
trying to reverse engineer a photo of a property from the street into meaningful information, vs using data collected from businesses dedicated to providing mapping/location data, and information provided by people expressly interested in improving the available data?
Look, obviously there's more to it than _just_ street view and algorithms. The article also talks about manual reviews, corrections, and verifications by lots of human staff. Google also allows businesses to add/update their listings. I've done it for ours. I've then had someone from Google call me to confirm it too. They also have Skybox imaging now as well as Waze.
I focus on street view because it is a big source of data (per the FA) and a testament to the comitmment and effort that's gone into it. In the U.S., how many other map makers actually drove 99% of the roads on thier map? Maybe that doesn't make a difference to you, but I think the central premise of this article and the general consensus of most users is that it does.
Apple licenses a lot of data from companies like TomTom and builds on the crowd sourced data provided by OpenStreetMap. Additionally, apple has a long history of striving to be the best at what they do. Google's approach is generally to be "good enough" across a broader range of services.
St. Louis streetwalker serial killer, Maury Travis, sent the local newspaper a computer generated map giving the intersection where he left a body.
Investigators determined that web-based mapping software Expedia was used--based on symbols used to mark highways and such--ruling out Mapquest, Yahoo, and others.
A single person had clicked on that intersection in Expedia in the 5 days before the map was received by the newspaper. They traced the person presumably using the IP address.
This was back in 2001.
It's odd that we still have unsolved street crime given that everyone today carries a tracking device sending back real-time geolocation data.
It's incredible how Google can get so many people to work for them for no pay. Would you similarly contribute to closed-source proprietary software if given the opportunity?
I'd put that sort of contribution in the detailed bug report category, something I'd absolutely contribute to closed source proprietary software if I thought there was a good chance it would get fixed and that I wouldn't have to deal with it being broken anymore.
I've filed many bugs on IE, Safari, and Chrome (for the last two not just on the Webkit/Chromium side, but also on the proprietary Safari/Chrome side).
I see your point, but the reality is that my users are there and these are also products I use every day. It's in my interest to have them work correctly.
Google Maps still does poorly in small towns, as far as I've seen. Not that you can really expect any better. The data in my hometown has clearly never been ground-checked (or even sanity checked by a remote employee), it's all clearly culled from webcrawelers and corrections by locals. There are businesses marked that haven't existed in a decade or more, and businesses that have existed for a decade aren't on the map. Yet another good reason to have a decent website as a small business I guess, when it's potentially the primary source of data for mapping/"local" services.
Well, they only re-drive most places every few years (Toronto seems to have 1-2 year gaps), so their own image sources won't necessarily have that data yet. Although, you'd think that local business listings would also be a data source and would probably be up-to-date. Do they scrape retailers' sites to learn about store locations? Guess not but would have assumed so.
Just wait for the self-driving car tests to ramp up. I think one of Google's early deployments will be a fleet of self-driving cars equipped to take streetview photos - this should enable something like weekly redrives of cities.
Keeping up with starbucks opening/closing stores would be impossible without the distributed power of their users, they pop everywhere, move regularly and aren't really critical for mapping. Luckily in SF you can't throw a stone without hitting a coffee shop, and of course, people here only use starbucks to meet people for craigslist transactions, no self respecting hipster would ever go in one.
Google maps is amazing. I was on my way to Detroit Airport, I live about 1.5hours away. Anyways, I wanted to double check directions so I used google maps, and it came up with directions that were going to take me 2 hours. I laughed thinking, 'oh technology, 2 steps forward, 1 step back'. So I drove down the way I already knew and was just double checking. With twenty minutes left in the drive, theres a deadstop traffic jam. Highway is closed. Turns out entire highways flooded in Detroit around 6-7am, and when I googled directions around 830am, google knew not to go that way, but I didn't. Made it to the airport 3 hours later, with a flight 6 hours after that. I had never been so impressed with google maps before this though. How did it know not to go that way so fast? I literally just drove right into it no warning or detour signs.
And yet, when I want to go from SFO to Cupertino, it absolutely refuses to offer taking 380 to 280, even when it is 10 to 15 minutes faster according to Google itself.
Apparently they still haven't fixed the whole "we have to go directly away from the destination for a little while" problem.
> The majority of buildings in the U.S. are now on Google Maps.
I doubt this. Out of curiosity I looked at my family's farm and Google Maps is missing most of our outbuildings. More generally I'm sure that they come up short on backyard sheds, pool buildings, structures in dense forests, etc.
Where do you think the majority of buildings are? I mean, there's a long tail, but more than 80% of the US population lives in urban environments; the head of that density graph is massive.
As a point of fact, most buildings do not exist where there are currently such things as trees, pools, and sheds... Most people, it would seem, tend to live in houses and complexes, work in factories and offices, or shop at stores and shopping centers.
An interesting anecdote: the "promenade claude lévi-strauss" is a new street in Paris (around 1 year old, pedestrian only). It doesn't exist in Google Maps yet, which make Uber fail when you try to go there as Uber rely on google maps.
(many people might want to go there, as it is now where all the paris urban planning administration is. I had to for a permit.)
Actually last I tried Uber/Google Maps sent you at the directly opposite corner of Paris, to the Quai Branly Museum, probably because there is something related to the anthropologist there (?).
Both Apple Maps and more interestingly the crowd sourced OpenStreetMap know about the "promenade".
I'm curious to see how long it will take Google to discover this new street.
After relying on Google Maps a lot for many years living in the US, I have (maybe unsurprisingly) noticed that it doesn't work nearly as well in Europe. As in, I'd zoom in on central Stockholm and search for something common, like the name of a restaurant, and Maps would promptly swoosh me to Nicaragua where it found a place with that name. It's doing stuff like this so often that I rarely use it anymore.
This article shows that Waze's method of crowd sourcing maps is the right way to go. Waze is able to have realtime detailed information about every street, building, directions, etc. including all the details that were discussed in the article + much more (e.g. future road changes), and most importantly it does that in a fraction of the cost.
Now it seems that the 1.3B that Google paid for it is probably a bargain
Despite all of Google' effort, they still rely too much on USGS published maps. For example, just 6 miles from the GooglePlex is a road in Newark with a gate [1], but Google doesn't know you can't drive on it.
They're doing a good thing, but unless you can see that Google has driven the route and has published street view, you can't entirely trust them.
So they have speed limit information? It would be handy if you could have that information on the navigation screen, maybe even with a warning when you exceed it.
Is the data gathered from crowdsourced smartphones? If it is then the precision is shit. Waze has been continuously unimpressive in dense urban environments. It can sometimes take 15 minutes to go two blocks through two lights. And neither Waze nor Google Maps correctly show that.
Using the GPS drains battery and there are huge privacy concerns. It's not an easy thing to do right. But I think it can be done.
Yes. It's several steps in the right direction. The god damn achievements and items and ads are incredibly annoying. But it's a good step. It also isn't used by enough people. How many drivers have smartphones? How many of those are contributing traffic data? The answer is, respectively, a lot and almost none.
I think that Android phone users who have opted in (Settings > Location > Google Location Reporting) are contributing traffic data when they're on a road and moving, or not, as the case may be.
Anyone have resources for mitigating the web map zoom level inaccuracy bug? I guess I know this only as the OSM bug, but it is the reason web mapping like OSM and Google Maps isn't used much by true GIS analysis. You can see this most easily by having your GPS on with your phone and using Google Maps on the web. When you zoom out your location accuracy decreases the more zoomed out you are. This doesn't seem to happen on the Maps app on my phone.
Osmarender hasn't been used in years. A new and faster tile service on the main openstreetmap.org website was deployed and that makes osmarender unneeded. Try OSM now, it might be good for you.
So the problems this article brings up about the Google Mercator projection have been solved? Do you have any links to more readings about the issues?
>"We have reviewed the coordinate reference system used by Microsoft, Google, etc. and believe that it is technically flawed. We will not devalue the EPSG dataset by including such inappropriate geodesy and cartography."
Well if I still use the Web Mercator I'm still going to have widely inaccurate feature rendering between zoom levels. Thank you for trying, I guess I should be asking these questions in GIS forums instead.
The zoom level bug you are hung up on was due to the way web mercator was implemented in Osmarender. This is why people are answering your concerns about teh zooming by pointing out osmarender is no longer used.
So no, don't use web mercator for analysis. But only worry about inconsistent rendering across zoom levels if you are using Osmarender.
Thank you!! Yeah I've never used OSM render, it is just the only place I had been able to find discussion about the inaccuracies of the projection. It also exists in all online slippy maps I've used from the latest OpenLayers to the latest Google Maps. Thanks again!
The features don't change between zoom levels. They will be displayed the same. The bug you're referring to is with a piece of software that isn't been used any more.
All projection systems have "inaccuracies". It has literally been mathematically proven ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theorema_Egregium ). Never the less, GIS people can, and do, use many projections professionally.
Thank you, I know you're trying to help, but this issue as the other commenter replied is not one due to inaccuracies of projections per se, but specifically the method by which layers are divided for use in web page interfaces.
There are projects based on OSM for routing, geo search, map editing, etc. that are also free. Definitely a lot of room for both programmers and non-programmers to contribute.
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Main_Page