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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."
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
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
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)
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!
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.
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!
Seriously, this is both interesting and disappointing. I've been working, as a hobby, on a Palm-based GPS mapping program. The reason I'm not making much progress is because even when I'm done it's not going to be very useful without map data which is probably not available for free. I had hoped there was some hi-tech way to snag decent map data (at least the roads themselves) perhaps by digitally analyzing satellite photos, etc. But this is a low-tech approach which certainly suggests to me that there's no realistic way I could come up with nationwide road data for my Palm app.
Oh well.
Sure there is. What we need is an "open source" map. Have anyone who wants upload their GPS "track" data to a central site. A little data massaging will be able to use the average of plots to determine major roads/highways, and a few volunteers could add names and addressing schemes. Maybe the individual users could even supply those if they wanted, with another averaging system to determine the correct name of the street based on percentages...
It could work. Would be a major, major project, though.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
The graph algorithms to calculate these routes are very mature. If there are problems, they're either from the algorithms being implemented improperly (unlikely, as they're actually quite simple algorithms), or there are issues with the data. Most likely it's the latter.
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
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.
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.
Yes, definitely. That was actually my idea and the app already can record tracks. Have people record their tracks and send them in. But it'd be a little more complicated than that, especially within cities. If someone sends me a track it's going to be almost useless if they don't tell me the names of streets, etc.
A central map repository would be great--and I have thought of that--but I wonder how many people would actually take the time to contribute--i.e., name the various legs of the GPS tracks. And then hope they named the legs right because if you've looked at a pure GPS track it's not entirely intuitive what is what since you don't have any context.
But something along those lines does make sense. An open source map repository would be damn cool and useful. And if it's worldwide that much better!
Don't blame MapQuest -- I was born here and still routinely get lost within walking distance of my house. And that's before you deal with the Big Dig literally moving on and off ramps around every month.
On the plus side, the first time you cruise through the Alewife Rotary and onto the 2 or through that demented I-93 to Columbia Point off-ramp (a ramp off an interstate in a major city that forces you to make a left turn across four lanes of high-speed traffic with the aid of a blinking yellow light) you'll feel like you've accomplished something. It seems a shame to move at that point.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
It's not all driving. Maybe for those people in the article, but not in general. I was watching them map downtown Hartford, CT a couple months ago. It was one guy with a PocketPC connected to a large GPS antenna on a backpack. He would take one pace, tap the screen, take another, and do this endlessly down the road. I saw him a few times in various places in the city over the next few weeks. He had a partner he would talk to on a two way radio but I don't know where he was. Talk about tedious.
I figured it was either done manually or maybe tied into a database by the road department as they pave things.
You know what?
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.)
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suwain_2
Hahaha You think those maps are right? Why do you this they send out survey crews whenever they do any sort of construction? I'll give you a hint, according to the city maps, theres a canal where a friend of mine's house is. The canal doesnt exist, and never did, as the house has been there before the map and most of the roads around it were built. Ask anyone that works from a power company or gas company how often the city maps are correct. This approach combined with sattelite photography is probably the only way to get realistic maps.
We're already way ahead of you. I'm one of the developers at project OneMap. We are currently building and serving one of the largest, free repositories in the world, completly built on open standards. We serve content in the fashion of GML and store everything internally as XML. We've integrated quite a few sources so far, both from a few custom norwegian sources and from the US TigerLine-files.
The main goal is to be able to update and review the content of our repository from within your own browser -- and we have the infrastructure to solve this. The biggest problem being that no-one has ever done anything like this in such a large scale, so we're kinda going along and feeling how the ground is all the way.
Our gateway (for viewing the maps) are currently built on SVG and utilizes the open, formatted GML response. The source is going to be opened up and everything is going to be available for free, but currently we're having a few issues we would like to solve before going public. As always, this is a work in progress. I'm probably doing my MSc with just this topic (updating a map by many individuals) and a way of making sure that only REAL changes go into the repository.
mats
One man's ceiling is another man's floor.
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