If you visit Hyderabad on Google Maps you’ll see some street maps that have been generated in a very novel way, using residents of the city, who’ve been sent satellite tracking equipment by Google. Essentially, they’re given software and a sat-nav and walk around identifying streets as they walk.
One of the problems with Google Maps, if you visit Plettenberg Bay in South Africa or Oia in Greece is that they don’t actually have any streets on them. The problem of acquiring all that street data is a tricky one, even in developed countries where they have reliable street maps. Google’s solution, using the people to map their own streets, is similar to the Open Street Map concept. Most people would probably say that if it’s on Google Maps they’ll rely on it, so there’s something very interesting here. Crowd-sourcing, as some refer to the idea of the masses creating a new product, is suddenly taking on authenticity as a source of reference material, and the only other example like this I can think of is wikipedia.
I wonder, thinking back to Tim Berners-Lee’s lecture in March, whether Google will ever try to differentiate between crowd-sourced mapping and authorised, government, mapping. There are places where mapping is very political, so the authority of a map can become very contentious.
As Brady Forrest suggests on the O’Reilly Radar blog, this open source approach to mapping is becoming a very hot topic for a lot of companies.
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And to think that Phyllis Pearsall created the London A-Z street map with nothing more than a lot of bus journeys and a stack of index cards!
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[...] we will need some kind of classification system or provenance checking that means we can tell which street maps were made by the public, and which encyclopedias were written by [...]
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