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Who Makes MapQuest's Maps?
carpoolio writes "TechTV has an interesting story about the company that builds the mapping technology behind popular map services like Mapquest. The company, Navigation Technologies, is decidedly low-tech in its approach to making its maps: two people in a car drive around endlessly, inputting street information and landmarks into databases. Navtech's map databases are used in everything from Garmin GPS units to Alpine in-dash auto navigation systems. So next time you turn the wrong way down a one-way street, know that there are real people behind the controls."
They currently have an opening for Associate Field Analyst in Las Vegas, NV. Good luck finding anyone willing to visit each and every strip club and bar in town, write down their addresses, and get paid while you're doing it.
Apparently they have been looking for someone to do that since June.
...two people in a car drive around endlessly...
And I thought my deadlines were unreasonable.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
They've place my address about a half mile down the road from where it is.
I WANT this job!
The guitars sound good, now give me about 10db more on the cow bell.
With a GPS receiver in many cell phones we need to figure out how we all can collaborate on creating maps. Here is a map I created with the data from my cell phone over the course of a couple of months. If everyone contributed instead of the data from a few people driving around we could pool the collective data and have great, open maps. This service is free until the end of the year, if everyone who can signed up and we pool the locations we would have a great map (not to mention traffic info.)
Free cell phone tracking
To the saying:
I've been everywhere man....
Congrats to Johnny Cash on all of his recent CMA awards. A great singer who will be missed.
Caution: Contents under pressure
Have gotten me lost so many times!
[FromTheMorning]
And badly, at that. Maybe MapQuest can give you directions to the top of the thread next time.
yeah, but what do THEY use for their directions?
====
Crudely Drawn Games
My first impulse is to crack a joke about this, but upon second consideration...
That sounds like an unbelievably sweet job; where do I send a resume? (And to think: all those pointless roadtrips and all that skipping school could come in handy.)
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
So if they get into a car accident while driving around making these maps and keeping them updated, does that accident info get uploaded into traffic.com's database and report it live on their website?
McLain helps keep track of where they've been and where they need to go, but she says she's best behind the wheel. "Personally I don't have a very good sense of direction. I just get lost even if I have a map," she says. When asked if being directionally challenged makes her the perfect candidate for this job, she's very enthusiastic. "I know what the most confused driver needs to know," she says. which of course is nothing. this isn't very reassuring.
Do they have a page you can e-mail to for corrections?
Someone really ought to tell them about the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston. They did some new construction over there, and now mapquest's directions around downtown Houston will occationally have you driving through the convention center.
Thanx
-- super ugly ultraman
And for every mile I drive I get
Has any company out there used topographical maps to maps 3D render of areas? And maps?
Most of these maps have dots for houses, green for forest, and lines for elevation it would seems you could scan this in and make some neat maps. Beyond me of course but is anyone doing this sort of thing?
My car has one of these things in it - the map systems runs of a data DVD rom in the boot (part of the CD changer assembly).
:o(
As a result I have been driving in Boston for 3 months and can't find my way from end to end, unlike every other place I have lived in (I can drive around NYC, London, Cambridgeshire and Lancashire with no map no problem). I have no idea what connects to where at all.
You need that period of getting lost all the time when you first move somewhere to really learn it, rely too much on GPS nav and you will never know the city properly
Cool for the odd weekend, but overreliance will cripple your direction sense. And worst of all, now I have lived here for so long I can't exactly switch it off and be late for everything - no excuse anymore.
Now I'm stuck forever buying map upgrades and newer and better systems at vast cost - it's a conspiracy to lock you in I tells ya, get out whilst the goings good.
Beep beep.
I'm suprised they don't strike up a deal with UPS, FedEx, and other companies that travel around alot that allows them to hook up receivers and use it to grab data that they can compare to their db.
Should be easy to tell if a street is new, changed, or whatever. Then they'd just have to send someone out there to verify the new data.
I'm actually surprised that this is how they do it. I've always assumed they hire people to drive over every road, but I figured there was a much better way to collect what I'm sure is a shitload of data.
-sam
I was just here, where did I go?
I worked at a company that was going to do vehicle tracking using GPS and those road map CDs you see at the computer store. We bought several of them from different companies. What we found was that they are full of mistakes. I believe that most of the data for these comes from a company called DeLorme (sp?). Unfortunately, it seems to have been compiled from obsolete government records. Something to keep in mind is you're planning a trip with these.
When all else fails, run.
Is that a word?
"...know that there are real people behind the controls."
Yeah. The maps are good, but the algorithm for path plotting could use some work. Sometimes it suggests the strangest ways to get somewhere...
Or maybe the program is trying to confuse humans and cost the world hundreds of billions of dollars in lost productivity???
The same two guys were sent overseas to map Europe. Fance mistook it as an invasion and surrendered...
IDK if I'm impressed by the level of misguided individualized attention or surprised that there isn't a wide network of volunteer contributors spread out over Northern America working to make a better web-based mapping tool on the fly using Wi-Fi technology integrated with GPS.
Hey, maybe I should patent that idea!
--When it's my time, I want to die in my sleep like my grandfather -- not screaming like all the passengers in his car
Navtech's map databases are used in everything from Garmin GPS units to Alpine in-dash auto navigation systems.
Southwesten Bell also uses their (mapquest) city maps for our phone book. Although not with an option to zoom.
Watch out if there the region you are going to is newly developed. You can almost be certain that the approximation used w.r.t area code will always be wrong.
Siggy Say, Siggy Do
Don't trust Mapquest for directions to the MOA if you don't know any better. It actually did end me up in a dead end 6 miles away from the MOA in a residential area. Pissed me off so bad...
Now I use Yahoo! maps...maybe they're the same...but I don't know.
I got nothin'.
I'd love to know how to get in touch with those guys to tell them about mistakes - if you put in my street address in Mapquest, you get directed to the other end of the street...
With a GPS receiver in many cell phones we need to figure out how we all can collaborate on creating maps.
"Can you hear me now? I'm on Main and First...."
"Can you hear me now? I'm on Main and Second...."
"Can you hear me now? I'm on Main and Third...."
On the other hand the census bureau is planning on having a new improved database for the 2010 census that includes every home in America with relative precision in the centimeter range and absolute precision in the meter range. Some of the tech that they use for this is VERY cool stuff.
You can start learning here.
The policy of the United States is worse than bad---it is insane. -- Ludwig von Mises, Economic Policy(1959)
Like why everytime I use the navigation system on my new Honda, no matter what address I give it, it always ends up taking me to either a dunken donuts, a pizza hut, a drive thru burger king, an adult book store, or a very curious apartment complex with a lot of foot traffic at night. Boy, those people must get around! And does the cop version only include the dunken donuts?
My Garmin GPS V uses those. They are very accurate. I've only had them be wrong in a few spots, mainly in tiny little towns. I wish they would update them sooner though and add more landmarks and items.
"Good."
This is a test. This is a test of the emergency sig system. This has been only a test.
who i should go after. my wife and i were looking for a restaurant in napa, and relying on mapquest's directions, ended up way in the hills, basically no where near the restaurant. i called the place and they asked me if i was using one of the mapping services. they told me that all attempts to get the directions fixed were ignored.
i wonder if the mapquests of the world aren't communicating back or if this place only updates things when they feel like it?
How many times has this happened to you?
...end up going down a one-way street. ...forget that bearing right could mean anything from making a turn that is less than 90 degrees right to turning the wheel an inch to the right while driving straight. ...successfully navigate yourself to BLAH BLAH Ave. South when you had typed in BLAH BLAH Ave. North. Congratulations! You are now lost in downtown! (And..no, those two streets could be miles apart and unconnected! Evil steet namers should die.)
You follow the directions given by Mapquest and
Feel free to add your own.
Favorite
Give mea break, Its hardly a 300 words article and what is so interesting about it ?
I couldn't get anything from the article, the real interesting part is the routing and not mapping. But the only information I found about routing was....
Moss opens up a "Shmem," or shared memory file, and puts in all the new info. When she gets back to the office, the heavy lifting starts.
"Usually it takes about twice the time to code it as it does to drive," Moss says. "There's so much information to put in."
Oh so they use Shmem , wow that's sooooo interesting.
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
Very close to every road is already digitized in the computers of municipalities, fedral and other government agencies. What we need isn't a swarm of GSP receivers but get the information into once place and make it public. The information already exists in pieces and it needs to be coordinated and released.
This does sound like a sweet job! I wonder what the pay is...
It surprises me that they didn't use the TIGER data, available from the US Census Bureau.
Klynas Engineering makes a great product called Streets-On-A-Disk that covers any mapping need you might have. I used it as the mapping backend for a custom automatic vehicle location package I wrote. The software has a nifty API interface for external control and works great. The tech support rocks too - Scott, the president of the company and the guy who wrote the program, has provided me with tons of useful info. I have no interest in the company, I'm just a very satisfied customer.
I see my shadow changing, stretching up and over me...
How many times has this happened to you?
You follow the directions given by Mapquest and
Feel free to add your own.
Favorite
I want Navtech to team up with a couple of the large carriers, like Schneider National, Werner Enterprises, JB Hunt and the other large trucking companies. These 3 companies, and many more, already have GPS transponders in the truck that track their locations and report back in realtime via Satellite.
Now, when a driver sees major road construction, etc, on major interstates they simply hit a button on their QualComm OmniTracs unit marking it as such. After so many drivers have done this, it marks the area as being under construction, with a little bit of info about what's going on (resurfacing, 3 lanes closed westbound from 9pm-4am at milemarker 139 to 177 until 12/16/03) and mapquest inturns adds that data to it's routing database.
This would be an excellent way for mapquest to add a pay-for service that I for one would definately use.
Looking for hardware (Currently need: Large Etch-a-Sketch) Have one? See my journal!
PC Load Letter?!? What the fuck does that mean?!? You probably don't know how hard I laughed while reading "SCO declares GPL invalid". That's just crazy! Please mod me down, I'm a redundant, trolling, flamebait-loving dogmatist and I was a pro-DMCA lobbyist.
Us adults with things like driver's licenses and responsibilities don't have these ridiculous fantasies about mapping bars, strip clubs and brothels. No, we've grown up a bit. We thing about things like COMPENSATION, which, given the job market, a posting that stays up that long indicates either the pay is insultingly low given the requirements to perform the job or the local economy is not as bad as the parent company may think.
Either way, you should go for it. Nothing can be lower paying than Burger King fry boy, and you dont have to wear the hair net or the cardboard crown to manage your fronds of greasy unwashed locks.
MapQuest gives you an aerial view of the address that you want in non-real time.
There was once a web site that provides an aerial view of an USA address. This web site was unique in the sense that it provided near real-time views. The views were updated once every 30 minutes.
Does anyone remember what is the URL of near real-time web site is? Thanks.
http://update.navtech.com/english_df.asp?ctry=Unit ed+States is the link for the US.
If they'd outfit those two with digital cameras, so they can take GPS-tagged (or at least date-tagged, to be later GPS'd from a log) pictures as they go.
At the very least, it'd be neat to have landmark and interchange photos up there.
I had to suffer with navtech maps for my autopc nav system. their maps are low quality, very limited in the amount of data and they ask a major premium for them.
Maps based on the US census Tiger data sets that are available FREE online are more useable than anything that navtech has ever produced.
I als used the GM navigation system that also is crippled by NAVTECH maps. now I look carefully, if I see navtech anywhere on the map or device I will not touch it.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
....they would love to have you believe that they have a bunch of Verizonesque goofballs driving all the streets, but in reality they get their basic street network from TIGER and/or GDT. The drivers mainly just go out for rural areas and new streets in cities. Mapquest even acknowledges GDT in their partners info.
I'd mod this flamebait, but I'm just as bitter as you are, homeboy. I've gone from respected sysadmin to considering renting the use of my bodily orificies to pay my rent.
*sigh*
El riesgo vive siempre!
Tooling around in my Eclipse all day would be awesome!
-=- Many seek good nights and lose good days.
My subdivision is a little over 3 years old. We're on all the other maps, but not MapQuest. Repeated emails to them to get this corrected have gone nowhere.
Odd thing is, if I map to the Albertson's near my house and then scroll down in their map, I see our subdivision. If I map to our address, none of the streets display.
Kinda sucks when you tell someone you need to give them directions when they say they'll just map it using MapQuest.
At least MapBlast works. Whether or not it'll do better now that Microsoft owns them remains to be seen.
Their LineDrive maps are better anyway.
Cruising the internet on my TI-99/4A @ a whopping 300 baud!
that's a pretty neat map - I like how you can _almost_make out the Beltway ;-)
about 123 maplewood lane, arcadia, georgia:
my mailbox is actually a foot to the left of where it is as shown on your maps
about ridgewood lane, templeton, massachusettes:
there is a little too much curve to the second right hand turn as shown on your maps. it's more like a hard angle than a curve
could you fix these two things?
thanks
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I wonder if these two actually drove around the 5 block circle that second time it appeared in my directions, or just logged it as "known path"?
...sometimes, in order to hurt someone very badly, you have to tell that person terrible lies. - PA
"I use the pen tool to write down names of roads or explain any significant changes to what we currently have in the database," she says. ;^)
Ghee, that really is some sophisticated technology they're using to solve these problems. Driving around in cars, using "pen tools" to "write down" information. It really smacks of the new millenium!
main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
A lotta folks are saying they don't understand why theres not some huge network of volunteers that are helping out. I'd also think that this would be beneficial to the entire digitized world, but for the simple fact that I would not want my charity to be used by a company to make their $$. If however someone with more time/programming-skills than I decided they'd lend their time to building a free solution then I'm sure volunteers would pop out of the wood work. (Free as in, the cd's and data distributed by users who aren't searching on the web.)
I'd guess that they have Ray Charles making their maps. I've had better luck with a 10 year old Thomas Street Guide.
Where am I now?
Where am I now ?
Where am I now?
Where am I now?
Where am I now?
Where am I now?
Where am I now?
Where am I now?
A few days of this and any jury in the nation would acquit.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
...successfully navigate yourself to BLAH BLAH Ave. South when you had typed in BLAH BLAH Ave. North. (And..no, those two streets could be miles apart and unconnected!)
You can't even rely on a compass in that case. In Oxford, UK, there are two streets quite close to one another called North Parade and South Parade. Guess which of them is further north?
Indeed. Numbered streets just plain make sense. It'd be fine if the names were nicknames, but don't make the numbers impossible to read, and certainly don't make the names "official".
You follow the directions given by Mapquest and ...end up going down a one-way street.
...and then you have to take a major shit. Late for a meeting you hang your pimply ass out the window and spew butt dumplings along the cardoor, then a cop pulls you over and rips a yield sign from the ground and hops on teh spoke - then George bush rains down "shock and awe" on the car filling you with a desire to deepthroat the stickshift. You race along wagging your engorged nipples at the crippled schoolkids until your passenger vomits partially masticated corn-nuts on a passing gay rights leader...
Hmmm... don't recall that one...
I've had much better luck with MS MapPoint than ANY online service. The driving directions and printed map quality are excellent. I moved to NC from TX a year and a half ago and its been a real lifesaver even with local directions. I'd highly recommend paying for it than using any free online service; haven't gotten lost once!
Mod parent up. Mapblast rocks, I kind of got worried when Microsoft took it over. Line drive directions are much easier to see than actual maps. They are the sort of maps someone draws for you when you ask for directions: no extraneous information, just the turns you need to make, and it normally includes one street before the turn to get you ready.
Tell them to drive through Williamsburg, VA again. I got SO lost last weekend courtesy of Mapquest...
How about; "Can you find me now?"
Un-news
Hamilton court is probably the busiest in Ontario, as Hamilton City Police is very large and they produce a lot of speeding tickets (in Ontario there aren't a lot of toll roads, speed limits are kept artificially low and governments use speed tickets as a source of revenue).
I thought about trying to contact Mapquest about it, but then I thought this is probably on purpose so that lost & guilty souls (or their hacker/cracker skilled paralegals) can adjourn trials :)
"One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that ones work is terribly important." -BRussell
This is related? How? What have you been smoking and would you care to share with the rest of the class?
Of course, if you wanted to license them, they were US$3,000 per quadrangle (7 1/2 minutes Longitued by 7 1/2 minutes Latitude) in 1991! It was a bit much. It was cheaper for us to take the TIGER maps and aerial photos and have people in the Dominican Republic redo the maps!
---- It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. It does this whenever it's told.
Usually it takes about twice the time to code it as it does to drive..
I dont see the code anymore.. to me it's just blonde, brunette, redhead...
Seriously, what are they 'coding'? Assuming they are talking about data entry, there must be a serious shortage of good tools out there if it takes them more time to enter the data than it does to drive the route.
This could be done much quicker with satellite images and some AI to help. Of course, we would need street signs that faced *UP* so they can be read by the satellite imaging systems... Maybe Navtech should improve their current tools first.
TallGreen CMS hosting
I suspect it is far more likely that it is the quality of the heuristics used to speed up the search. These graph algorithms are very expensive and the heuristics used to speed up the searches can lead you don the wrong path (pun intended...)
For an example I have notice that mapquest directions suck even more than usual when crossing state lines, their heuristic seems to only want to cross state lines on major roads (interstates...). even when a smaller road is obviously (to a human reading a map) far superior.
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
In Tucson the I10 and I19 are under heavy construction so I wonder how long it will take for those guys to visit Tucson and get the maps updated. In the last two years several freeway exits have been removed from the freeway to never be reopened. Some roads now require drivers to get off at an earlier offramp and take a frontage road to the street you want.
.
I know that sites like mapsonus.com have a link to e-mail them about wrong/changed roads on the maps, but if it's really just up to two guys driving around then maybe it will take a wile.
Even worse, what if they actually take people at there word! "Oh yes, you can get off at the Willmot exit now and drive all the way to the Park Place mall ever sence they closed the military base. You can just drive across that area and nobody will mind."
If anyone is ever stupid enough to actually try that I hope they pick a mellow yellow alert level day to do it. They might go nuts if the national threat level is orange or red or something.
I have also noticed that some of these services will give me directions like "turn right onto unnamed road." The road really isn't unnamed, it just doesn't have a street sign. I guess asking the city for the info is too much work.
I am not suggesting that the people running Tucson or any other city actually know what they are doing. .
Anyway, none of these map services guarantee the results so before you follow the directions you should ask someone who actually knows that area (if you can find someone like that) expecially if there has been road construction. It might actually be faster taking the long way.
Losing faith in humanity one person at a time.
Whaddya mean, 'that was a lie'?
oh.
It's Cool, I Know Him.
Ok, so it's about Yahoo Maps instead of MapQuest, but I still think it applies.
How do MapQuest etc. describe driving in roundabouts? I have only seen wayfinder.com
describing them as "left in the roundabout" etc.
I figured it was either done manually or maybe tied into a database by the road department as they pave things.
You know what?
Give this assignment to the Geocachers. They'd actually ENJOY the work!
-Valiss
That is an excellent site. Very fun.
Norris/Palin 2012
Fact: We deserve leaders who can kick your ass and field dress your carcass.
I can't imagine life without being able to get directions, and a custom-made map, to somewhere an hour and a half away that no one's ever heard of. I really don't think I could navigate with a paper map anymore.
But technology's most amusing when it all blows up. I wish I could find the link, but I distinctly remember reading about some lady who tried to plot an intracity voyage, and got routed through about 12 states -- even venturing into Canada for a while. (Does anyone else remember this?) And someone I know was talking about how on a recent trip, he tried navigating only by GPS; it worked perfectly, until it had him turn down onto what was a dead-end street. It turns out that the GPS assumed he could drive about 100' through the woods, up a steep embankbent, to get onto the highway. (I suppose it would have been a convenient shortcut, if only he had been in a Hummer and had a chainsaw for those pesky trees.)
________________________________________________
suwain_2
Our house sits at a 4-way intersection with two of the four directions leading to dead ends. But MapQuest and a few other major maps show one of these streets to be through to the a road the other side of the cul-de-sac. Heck, you can't even see the other road from the cul-de-sac. I've seen plenty of folk driving around the cul-de-sac with a quizical look. But even if it were a through street, I dunno how many people would take it--at that point the other 'street' is, in fact, a narrow dirt track leading for a few miles over a creek and up a steep hill before turning to asphalt. Gawd, I love the country life!
"Love is a familiar; Love is a devil: there is no evil angel but Love." --William Shakespeare ('Love's Labors Lost')
Everytime I have used mapquest in the past, I always get these longwinded directions. And then when I finally reach my destination, I figure out that I could have cut my time in half by going a more simpler, obvious way. I use M$ map point. Its local on my system, I dont have to connect to the internet to use it AND and can figure out, ahead of time, which way is the best way to go.
I have, while following mapquest directions, ended up at an underpass where the next step was to get on the highway overhead.... Unfortuantaly there wasn't an enterance to said highway for miles in either direction. I figured that this was some poor algorithmic decision, but now that I know there's some obvoiusly malicious human entering intersection data I'm even more annoyed!
Hi there
I have been working on a project that does that and more (ogg playing) for the past year or so.
check it out and tell me what you think (you can help too)
navsys, here
You can report map corrections here and driving directions problems here.
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
But I definitely see them being inaccurate especially on shorter trips, where those things aren't as much of a factor. Not to mention a few times when I mapped out a place a mile away and it gave me a 7+ mile route involving two major roads (even after I checked the avoid highways button)... so they must have some algorithm for determining how long it takes to drive on a particular type of street, that isn't always terribly accurate.
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
Navtech has thier user support and IT HQ in Fargo ND. I have a friend there that works helpdesk. He said that people driving around checking the roads in each city must be able to drive the speed limit while typing in information. The employees are gauged on how quickly they can accoumplish these tasks. I would assume typing with one hand wile driving with the other and trying to concentrate on both the road and the laptop would be quite difficult. These drivers record on ramps/off ramps. distance measurements based off the tripometer, and in some cases other important signs.
Nav tech's goal is to have every major city(top three largest) in every state to be 100% correct in street locations. For smaller cities Nav Tech uses satellite imagery combined with USGS surveys to create all other roads.
Nav Tech is the only mapping company that does this. All other companies just use USGS surveys/databases and put all those numbers into a nice graphical package for people.
The bottom line is Nav Tech should be significantly more accurate then any other mapping company.
There is or can be built a machine that can simulate any physical object. -Church-Turing principle
I have had some bad experiences with internal maps and some good ones. (I have a Garmin 76S) Remember that the purpose of the base maps is to sell you the more detailed ones later.
While in well-travelled areas in eastern Canada/NE USA the accuracy was reasonable and if it was paved it usually appeared, and I never had any problems navigating
On the other hand...
The South American part sucks goatse.cx
Rivers 20km away from their actual location (we're talking tributaries of the fuckin' Amazon here not some muddy little trickle!!) Cities of 80,000 people not on map, Interstate highways missing, Entire states missing (Tocantins) but pissant ranches owned by some dope dealer in the correct location. Whassup with dat?
Prolly the old use fake info so they can sue for copyright violations trick...
Watashi wa chikyubutsurigakusha desu.
Mapquest's maps are great, but yow! their driving directions are usually awful! Try getting directions between two points in New Jersey, for example.
I want the job to discover the fastest route!!!
But I'd probably lose to someone with 10 years in the pizza delivery biz =(
Mapquest will occasionally tell you to get off of an interstate past where the location is, then get back on the interstate and go back in the opposite direction. Anyone else experience this?
Try mapping from Danbury, CT to Rowayton, CT for example.
I have long been looking for GPS software to go along with my PocketPC. This would allow me to buy a very inexpensive GPS unit (as it wouldn't need a display or any memory) and, hopefully, have a lot of available memory and maps to use. I see no reason to pay for the elaborate interface of a GPS unit when I already have a PocketPC that can do the job. The only disadvantage is the battery consumption of the PocketPC, but I don't see this being a very large problem.
Unforunately, I haven't been able to find any decent software available at a reasonable price. Has anyone else?
Rochester, NY.
Directions for Alexander St involved driving through an intersetion for Alexander St, going to the next block and making 3 right turns.
I known that most local government agencies (well atleast in California) maintain there own street maps in their GIS (Geographic Information Systems) systems. NavTech would not need to do all that work and would have probably better and the most up to date maps. I wonder if NavTech knows this.
The driving around work is only part of the process.
The work is primarily done by teams of workers putting together the road network in a GIS based on topographic maps and air photos. The addresses are added to the data from parcel maps, census data, postal data, etc...
The driving around work is to field check the data and keep it up to date. Building the data by driving each road wouldn't be cost effective.
Now wouldnt that be cool?
Imagine one day when everyone's desktop computer is as powerful as Japan's Earth Simulator, someone will build the ultimate 3D multiplayer gaming map.
Navtech only uses itinerant techs to do QA of data in the database, not to create it. It comes from a variety of sources, mainly federal/state/county/city goverment.
The database not only has artery map information, but also traffic related info (max speed, illegal turns, # of lanes, etc.) and address information, so they are capable of creating realistic routes from address to address.
I worked close to them for a few years, I can only say that they have solution in search of a problem. I don't think that are out of the red after more than 15 years trying (private company, last time I knew a guy named Shields owned it).
I live in the metro Washington DC area, and NONE of the mapping programs, or print maps do much good.
Even with a map, it is difficult to impossible to navigate the area.
None of them tell about the many, many roads and exits that close, open or change direction , or are HOV-only based on time of day. And, none will tell you that as soon as you get on the beltway, you need to cross 6 lanes of traffic in that one mile to exit!
Navigation by trial and error is the only way to do it, unfortunately. No public, private, or user database can cure that, not without lots more information.
I won't even start on the "normal" traffic problems: construction, flooding, wrecks, parades, snipers, man on tractor, potholes, rubbernecking, terror alerts, bright sun, sinkholes, amber alert, rain, snow, etc.
Anytime someone wants to visit me, I give them very detailed instructions, and I specifically tell them to not trust ANY mapping service completely. It may, without making an actual mistake, send you down a street that is HOV, that has changed direction, under construction, with a closed HOV exit, during rush-hour, in a not so safe part of town. The map may be 100% accurate, and miss all of this.
Thanks for reading.
...I'd like to see them team up with the people who produce the exit directories, and add in service stations etc.
I want answers to things like "Where is the nearest Flying J on my route?" or "How far to the next rest area?"
I've done the mapping software (National Geographic trip planner) + GPS thing, and while the moving map is really nifty, it would be more useful if it had more data.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
The TIGER files are a good place to start with a new mapping endeavor, but they are not an end unto themselves. A people's mapping project would do well to use a distributed approach that builds on what the TIGER files offers.
Digital Citizen
Please mod parent down. It is offtopic.
And naturally I posted my stupid comment under an unrelated "real" comment, instead of replying at root level. Must slink away now...
The maps are NOT generated the way the post implies - by driving around. Perhaps businesses are, but permanent landmarks like lakes, rivers, cemeteries, etc are from digitized tax maps. I know this because my GPS database includes long-forgotten West Virginia roads (now barely passable by 4-wheel drive) and tiny streams with no name and cemeteries that have only four bodies in them!
I wouldn't mind if someone distributed the data for a fee, but anything they distributed I would want complete access to as well including the ability to share it and modify it; this is one of the reasons why I like the GNU General Public License for computer programs. Like the Free Software Foundation (who wrote the license), I am also interested in building a commons with anyone who will help, including businesses, but I don't want to help those who keep their published improvements from me. It will take me some time to consider how well the GNU GPL applies to mapping data.
Digital Citizen
Back when Yahoo maps was just getting underway, my friend and I decided to do a little test.
We got driving directions and a map from his place to my place. One look at what was on the screen told us their maps were created from normal printed street level maps.
Yahoo told my dear friend to drive down 65th Ave, then make a left onto I-205 Northbound. Problem is, there's an approximatly 30-40 foot drop off the bridge, and no onramp. Not to mention the cars below going 65MPH as you landed nose- or top-down on the freeway.
Since then, I've never really been able to trust online driving directions...
Bring it on, slashdot. Tax my OC3 to death. I dare ya.
I posted this under a different thread, above, but it fits better here, as it's related:
------------
Back when Yahoo maps was just getting underway, my friend and I decided to do a little test.
We got driving directions and a map from his place to my place. One look at what was on the screen told us their maps were created from normal printed street level maps.
Yahoo told my dear friend to drive down 65th Ave, then make a left onto I-205 Northbound. Problem is, there's an approximatly 30-40 foot drop off the bridge, and no onramp. Not to mention the cars below going 65MPH as you landed nose- or top-down on the freeway.
Since then, I've never really been able to trust online driving directions...
Just wondering if you have any idea what you are talking about. "Low Tech"???!!! As far as I know, this company is, by far, the leader in digital mapping worldwide, utilizing the best equipment and technology for field research. I must say that I'm amazed that there are lot of posts already for a story on TechTV that hasn't even actually been broadcast yet. There are lot of interesting posts....obviously from people with some knowledge of mapping...and some experiences of Mapquest (I've actually had bad directions from that website too...so it's obviously not a perfect service). However, there were a lot of idiotic and non-sensical posts....from people who obviously have nothing better to do and also have no idea or knowledge of this topic. But I'm still dumbfounded by the "low tech" comment. Of course, not sure if I can take anything seriously from a guy named CmdrTaco.
MapQuest's map data is not all from NavTech. Some is from GDT (Geographic Data Technology), who also supplies the geocoding data used by MQ (as of '99, and as far I know). Maps in large cities are generally NavTech (where it has better data), but those from more rural areas are generally from GDT. (This is in the copyright info on the lower left part of the map).
Hey it is a fun job, if you don't mind the nonstop construction, meth labs, gun minded idiots in the mountains, traffic, and having to put up with the retired fogeys and hookers in Pahrump.
There is a decided downside to volunteer mapping, and I assert that this is one of the reasons why the bazaar model of programming will have a very hard time creating mapping programs.
If I create a new algorithm for computing a nearly optimal route from A to Z, given a set of data describing the paths from A to Z, then anybody with a background in programming can review my algorithm. They may not be able to determine if my algorithm is perfect, but they can at least validate that it computes a route, not formats your hard drive, or deliberately routes you the long way around. At a minimum, they can throw some random routes at it, and see what happens.
However, it is harder to validate something like map data - if I submit an alleged map of my neighborhood, how do YOU validate it? Sure, if you live in the area you can drive over and check, but if you live in California, you can hardly check my work about a neighborhood in Kansas. And if you get nobody saying I am wrong, is that because I am right, or because nobody who cares to check lives close enough to where I live.
That is where companies who's life's blood is mapping have the advantage - they PAY people to check on these things. However, with Delorme admitting they no longer support Macintosh, just Windows and various PDAs, if you want trip planning and consumer mapping, you pretty much have to be running Windows (or maybe, if you hold your tongue just right, Wine).
I'd love to see a Free Software mapping solution.
I'm just afraid of finding the Natalie Portman Hot Grits Museum on 31337 Goatse Ave in the database.
www.eFax.com are spammers
"Forget striking a deal, just ship a bunch of packages all over the place, and track where they go. :)"
*sigh* Geeks.
Why not get the information off the people who plan and build the roads? As for private roads. I believe some need permits at least. So monitor that as well.
I just came in from a day of doing this. I hope they pay well.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
What we found was that they are full of mistakes.
Some of those 'mistakes' are there to protect intellectual property. False streets and other features are inserted into maps so that if your competitor simply copies your maps, you can prove he did. I'd hope that those 'features' would be avoided by the direction software, but I wouldn't be surprised if they weren't.
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
What do you consider to be a reasonable price?
? Screen= PROD&Store_Code=DE&Product_Code=GPSUNNS&Category_C ode=NAVS
I just bought Routis 2004 with a GPS for $199. This includes the interface/car adapter for the pocketPC.
It was one of the most reasonable combos I've found, and the navigation software looks to be a bit better than some of the others I've looked at (Mapopolis comes to mind).
It has voice prompts, and big buttons for the onscreen menus and keyboard, so you can use your finger instead of trying to use the stylus while driving.
Here's the link:
http://www.deluo.com/Merchant2/merchant.mv
Disclaimer: I ordered it two days ago, and haven't recieved it yet, so no testing by me has been done. They do offer a 30-day money back guarantee, though.
...two people in a car drive around endlessly, inputting street information and landmarks into databases.
Gotta be Sisyphus, but who's his partner?
--
As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
I somehow doubt that a couple people actually drove through every town in the U.S. gathering data. Why? Because I've seen numerous alleys and dirt roads although labeled on Mapquest, no road signs appear IRL. I would be more prone to believe that they send someone out to state or county offices and ask for a copy of maps from the county/state engineer.
I hate all sigs, even this one.
Unfortunately, I've lost track of it.
I searched, and only found this small project from 2000.
Navtech has a feedback site where you can alert them to incorrect streets, missing streets, etc.
Just click on your language; select your country and click "Submit"; then fill out the form and click "Submit" again.
Though NavTech supplies many of the consumer-facing map portals, those portals don't all update their data at the same frequency. For example, many months after San Francisco's central skyway was closed and knocked down, MSN and MapQuest still showed it as a drivable road. Yahoo, which also uses NavTech, had a valid map.
See my blog entry on comparing map websites for details.
1 START cellphone
10 SAY Can you hear me now? Good!
20 STEP
30 SAY Can you hear me *now*? Good!!
40 STEP
50 GOTO 10
We've seen this done on the VZ wireless commercials. The guy has been trying to do this same US "mapping" thing for months, the poor little man!
I wonder how many "footsteps" it will take to cover the entire USA surface area. C'mon, friends! Someone's gotta know
"Wireless : LAN
I used to live on a street that was suffixed to death. All within a couple of miles, there were "Ave", "Cir", "Ct", "Pl", "Plc", "Way" variants of the same street. At one stretch, the "Ct" went for half a block, turned 90 degrees and changed into "Pl", then went about 2 houses and turned 90 degrees changing into "Way". "Plc" also existed as a one block zig-zag parallel to "Pl" only 2 blocks away. Mapquest, UPS, FedEx, Pizza dudes, no one was ever able to find my apt without having to resort to a desparate spiralling search pattern.
----- And all that the Lorax left here in this mess was a small pile of rocks, with one word...UNLESS.
Why the hell duplicate efforts, when there are more than enough maps already available? Has anyone heard of the Highway Department? Each state tends to have one. How about AAA? These people all have highly detailed maps of states, etc. It would be -significantly- cheaper to pay for the maps that are already available (and are likely more accurate since, well, they're designed by people that are trained to make maps), and the data would be better.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
When asking for directions from Houston's Galleria district to downtown, I must have gotten someone who knew they were working their last day there.
No need for the suggested "reality check" as this person certainly had driven the route ... the recommended path actually had you pull into someone's private driveway of a mansion in the very expensive River Oaks section of Houston to do a U-turn to avoid traffic lights.
And they were right with this nationally published advice!
I used to travel a lot with this indie band, Joe 90. While travelling to the nearly non-existant town of Independence, Orgeon, they came to an impossible situation, thanks to the brilliance of Mapquest. Basically, the road just stopped. At the banks of a river. Since they did not have a floating van thing a la Oregon Trail, they turned around, and ended up late for their own show. Always check mapquest against other sources. I believe they even have a disclaimer somewhere on their site suggesting "do a reality check and make sure the road still exists."
absolutely. i work for a company that has processed the tiger data on their own. it seems like a great format for people to enter data in, but an awful one to read. even if you *are* able to read the format which is quite a chore in itself, you cannot just use off the bat. you have to process it in usable regions/polygons (whatever you want to call them) because everything is split up far beyond the point it should be. for example, all the lat/lon data is a very strange integer of the real values.
BSD is for people who love UNIX. Linux is for those who hate Microsoft.
Here in Brazil we have a group, called TrackSource, wich carries a project of mapping all the country roads and streets, people drive with their gps's, then submit tracks to a moderator which compiles it in a broader map and then put it for free on a site.
e =News& file=article&sid=100&mode=&order=0&thold=0
This page is in Portugues, but you can get a feel
http://www.portalgps.com.br/modules.php?nam
In this day and age, I think such a 'low-tech' approach is ludicrous. Aside from the environmental costs (fuel, pollution), any updates to maps take a long time. Why not use GIS (Geographical Information Service) data? Since most of these systems are tax-funded, mapquest.com could get them for free. Or hell, localities can SELL the data to mapquest, helping to offset budget crises.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
for satellite based laser targeting of suspected dissidents? Ya, that would be cool.
Why dont they just start paying wardrivers? Give us a free gps, datacable and software along with some gas money and junk food and I'm sure most of us would be happy to leave it running in the background while we do our thing. Wardrivers often drive around cities erratically, we dont stick to main streets or anything so it seems like it would be ideal for their purposes.
"Personally I don't have a very good sense of direction. I just get lost even if I have a map," she says.
cheers- raga
bang goes your internet access, your relationship as your sysadmin posts stuff from your account to your girlfriend(s)...
A sysadmin would do that to someone who isnt fat, sexless, greasy dirty smelly think geeking fat idiot. Anyone who isnt all of the above deserves retribution out of jealousy.
TeleAtlas is a competitor of NavTECH
They provide this interesting tool:
http://www.geocode.com/modules.php?name=Te
Would it be possible to write a script that correlates al the data we gather with the TeleAtlas database? If we assume that the TeleAtles-database is correct of course.
Is suppose you could even write a script that drains their database (querying every adress in the telephonebook and storing the responses in a databse
> Odds of actually achieving a useful, properly updated, set of data aren't actually zero, but they're pretty damn close.
Sounds like a Wiki!