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Google's approach to crowdsourcing map data

I was curious about this after the State of the Map conference but it seems last week Michael Jones, the CTO of Google Earth, shone a little light on the subject of Google's crowdsourced maps of India (along with other geo things from Google) at the Cambridge Conference.

I've transcribed the part of the podcast that really interested me (see below), describing what they've built up in terms of geodata for 50 Indian cities and how they are doing it with a pilot project to deploy a 'care package' to countries to let the citizens map it for themselves based on local knowledge and Google's excellent aerial imagery sources*.

"... I'll show you one more thing. Lets say we go to Hyderabad, India. Now, it turns out that it takes more than money to get good GIS data, it actually takes data that's available to get. Now we have a problem with that because sometimes we can't get good data.

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.

There's no real economic benefit in that, it just seems right that everyone should have a map. So we're doing everything we can to get mapping data to every human and in some countries where there's no data, we're trying to give them tools to build the data.

There is data in India it's just that the Royal Survey of India got its licensing plans from its ancestor in the Ordnance Survey. [laughs]. But there are countries though, where there is no data and we have to help them develop data. There are countries where there is data, and we license that. There are in between countries where there is both commercial data and official data, and we'd love to have the official data - and we'd be happy to pay for it - we just need to have some way to work with the government to do that.

So that's an exciting opportunity for us, but I'll remind you, just from a technology standpoint, we'd love to work with you but we don't have to. [laughs from the audience]. And the reason for that is that the local people are the local experts. They're not surveyors so you can't really trust their locations, but what's interesting when you have a few million users, you can do statistical analysis of contributed data. You can get the same thing from different IP addresses over a long period of time, with a high correlation, you can start to believe in it. You can show that with a tentative colour, and have people click on whether they believe it or not and have confirmatory comments. You can actually converge to pretty good data and it has the advantage of, when the road is closed, you can click on that road and say it's closed today. If you're having a block party, you can say the block is closed this day. Traffic data that's up to date every day."

If you're familiar with OpenStreetMap then this may all sound familiar, except for the fact that Google has an enormous audience all over the world, and if only a few of Google's users in each place around the world would start mapping their local areas then the planet would be mapped in no time.

I wonder if they will license the data out at all, or just allow the rendered maps to be used through their services?

(via)

* This crowdsourcing project may also partially explain why Google is not as keen as Yahoo in allowing OpenStreetMap contributors to use their aerial imagery.

Posted in at 8:01 PM on Tuesday 24 July 2007 | Comments (1)
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Isle of Man mapping party

The Isle of Man is going to be having its first OpenStreetMap mapping party on Saturday 1st September, with the main aim of mapping the Island's capital, Douglas.

(I'm not going to be around after Sunday morning unfortunately - I need to fly back to Stuttgart - but if others are then Ramsey may also be a good target if we get Douglas completed.)

Details are pretty sparse at present but I'll be fleshing out the Isle of Man mapping party information over on the OpenStreetMap wiki. If you're interested, please add yourself to the list over there.

If anyone is thinking of travelling from outside of the Island and would like advice on getting to the Island, or somewhere to stay, let me know.

Posted in , at 2:14 PM on Saturday 21 July 2007 | Comments (2)
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How the GeoCMSs compare

At the State of the Map conference it was great to be able to meet up with two guys who also have interests in creating geographically able content management systems (GeoCMS), Andrew Turner who created the GeoPress plugin for MovableType and WordPress and Henri Bergius who is one of the founders of the Midgard CMS.

Before their talk on GeoClue we had a good opportunity to sit down and talk through some of the current functionality of the different systems, see where they differ, and try to agree on some common base functionality that we felt should be present across the different platforms.

The features included things like ability to save a location (obviously), how many locations could be used to reference each post, the presence of maps and which providers they used, the ability to post location information through the blogging API, the inclusion of Microformats (hCard), syndication formats (GeoRSS, KML, etc.), OpenSearch capabilities, reverse geocoding of coordinates to give place information, posting by email, and a couple of others.

When I get a chance I'm going to build up a table over on the Geospatial Content Management System Wikipedia page to compare the systems we talked about (WordPress, Midgard and Drupal) but also others such as Joomla, TikiWiki and Plone. Any input on those would be much appreciated as I haven't done much with them to date.

Update: I didn't notice that Henri had already blogged a little about this, and after the conference went off and added maps to Midgard using Mapstraction... cool!

Posted in , , at 5:06 PM on Wednesday 18 July 2007 | Comments (1)
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Crowdsourced street maps for commercial providers

The State of the Map conference at the weekend - organised mostly by the OpenStreetMap Foundation - was a great success. It drew in a broad mix of a crowd, from OSM hackers through to academics, surveyors, cartographers and those in business who are in a position to both benefit from the project and support it in achieving its goals of mapping the world - many of them actually being sponsors of the weekend.

Ed Parsons, geospatial technologist at Google, took the opening speech on Sunday, drawing on his experience as ex-CTO of the Ordnance Survey and his new role at Google. He highlighted just how much of the world is covered by user-created content of some sort, showing hubs of activity in Britain - likely due to the Geograph project - and other places around the world, noting that there were very few gaps in the coverage. Few gaps in coverage suggests there are few places without people who have and interest in geography and the area around them. It'd be interesting to compare Ed's (Google's) map of user generated content with OpenStreetMap's map of user generated geodata and see how different or alike they are in their hotspots of activity.

The main point of this post was to point out Ed's announcement that Google is using crowdsourced map data for some of their maps of India. I don't recall the source of the data (Mumbai Free Map, perhaps?) but I am curious, at what point would Google start using OpenStreetMap's crowdsourced data?

He brought up two issues that were affecting that decision at present: licensing - a big issue in the community - and quality* - something we need to start start thinking a lot more about now that some areas are 'complete' and potentially ready for being used as such, and many others getting closer to that point every day. What issues did they have to work through to get the Indian maps into their transport layer on Google Earth (and Maps?)?

No prizes for guessing which part of the world I'd like to see covered by the major mapping providers...

The closing talk at State of the Map was given by Sean Phelan, founder of MultiMap, about the history of web mapping. He was joined by John McKerrell, senior software engineer and developer of their cool new 'slippy map', to talk about the modern age of web mapping.

Sean's personal prediction (wish) was that they'd be able to use OpenStreetMap as a layer on the MultiMap website by the end of 2007. But with the (possible though ambitious) aim of Steve Coast - OpenStreetMap founder - of finishing the map of Britain by mid 2008, it'll be interesting to see how they deal with the issue of 'completeness' of the map. How will end users feel about an incomplete map? Will it drive more people into the project to fix up the map?

Users aside (for now), there's one thing for sure and that's that MultiMap, the first British online mapping provider, will be viewed as a visionary by those of us building the maps and hopefully also by those in industry who may not be convinced right now of the value of user-created maps.

* actually, looking back through Ed's presentation I think the second point wasn't quality as such, but about the reach of the project... I should've taken notes :)

Update: See Frank Taylor's post on gearthblog.com about Google's maps in India and listen to Michael Jones' (Chief Technologist of Google Earth) presentation about it.

Posted in at 10:21 PM on Monday 16 July 2007 | Comments (0)
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Views support in Drupal's KML module

To set up a KML feed in Drupal all you need to do, after downloading the latest Drupal 5 version of KML module, is create a new view, enable the 'page' display for that view and choose 'KML feed' as the format to display. You can then filter it by anything you wish, sort it in different ways and feed it arguments to filter it down even further on the fly (untested, but should work).

If you want to use that feed as a self-refreshing network link, point the user at http://www.example.com/kml/view/<viewname>/networklink

I haven't had a chance yet to test it all thoroughly but it appears to work just fine. Any feedback and testing appreciated though, as always.

Posted in at 6:22 PM on Monday 16 July 2007 | Comments (1)
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