http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/08/google_uses_cro.html
Google has been sending GPS kits to India that enable locals to make
more detailed maps of their area. After the data has been uploaded and
then verified against other participant's data it becomes a part of
the map. The process is very reminiscent of what Open Street Map, the
community map-building project, has been doing. The biggest difference
is that the data (to my knowledge) is owned by Google and is not
freely available back to the community like it is with OSM.
This news comes to us via a speech Michael T. Jones (CTO of Google
Earth) gave at the Cambridge Conference. Dan Karran transcribed an
audio recording in this post. Here's the most relevant portion of the
transcription (there's more on Dan's site):
This is Hyderabad, and if you see the dark areas, those correspond
to roads in low detail. If you zoom in, you'll see the roads, and if
you expand a little bit, you'll see both roads and labelled places...
there's graveyards, and some roads and so forth.
Now, everything you see here was created by people in Hyderabad.
We have a pilot program running in India. We've done about 50 cities
now, in their completeness, with driving directions and everything -
completely done by having locals use some software we haven't released
publicly to draw their city on top of our photo imagery.
So we're building a little care package we can send to countries
like Togo, and say if you want to have maps of your country, you may
not have a national mapping agency of any merit, but if you have some
inspired amateurs, you can map out your country. FIll out all the
details and then you can do routing and navigation just like in the
big countries.
It is interesting to see the continuing inclusion of user-generated
content in mapping data. Google made it clear that it was going to
pursue this method of getting data very seriously when they began
building out Google Earth with user contributed 3D models (Radar
post). But Google certainly isn't the only one taking this approach.
GPS manufacturer Tomtom just bought data-provider Tele Atlas, a move
that will create millions of map contributors out of its users (Radar
post). As-yet-to-be-launched startup Everyscape will be enlisting
GPS-empowered photographers to document towns (Radar post). I'll bet
Microsoft is also experimenting with large-scale user contributions
and we just aren't aware of it yet.
How long till we are all contributing to some mapping database every
time we go for coffee?
Sean Gorman (thanks for the tip) of FortiusOne and Frank Taylor of the
Google Earth Blog have further commentary.
