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Open US GPS Data?
tobiasly writes "I read an article today about a map error on the popular Garmin GPS devices which often leads to truckers in a particular town becoming trapped. From my own experience, every electronic map I've ever seen (Google, Mapquest, my Mio GPS) has the layout of my neighborhood completely and frustratingly wrong. A quick search turned up only one open-source mapping project, but it's for New Zealand only. Why are there no comparable projects in the U.S. or elsewhere? Obviously such a project would need a good peer-review/moderation/trust system but I'd gladly put in the time necessary to drive around town with my GPS in "tracking" mode, then upload, tag, and verify my local data. Has anyone with more technical knowledge in maps and auto-routing looked more into this? Are there technical limitations to such a project? Should the government subsidize a project to create open, free, up-to-date electronic maps? Surely there is a public benefit available from such a project."
Try TomTom MapShare.
Towards the Singularity.
Which in the future they can sell!
http://www.openstreetmap.org/
It can definitely be frustrating. There's a street near my house where I grew up that is complete on every online map I've ever seen, but the truth is it's actually two dead ends that don't meet up. I've seen other mistakes as well. Unfortunately the same bad data keeps getting recycled everywhere, because companies are too lazy to verify things. I'm all for an open source mapping project, or at the very least better ways of reporting errors.
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
OpenStreetMap is pretty good, and getting better.
"how can they call it a MINE if everything here is THEIRS?!?!" -Straight Jacket
What about OpenStreetMap? Some areas are done quite well, especially in the UK, by the looks of things, US mapping is going well too.
OpenStreetMap is building a, well, open street map. My town in eastern Pennsylvania seems pretty up-to-date as far as I can tell. And they're working on aerials too.
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For Argentina, there is www.proyectomapear.com.ar
Openstreetmap is good.
The only two suppliers of nav map data in North America are Navteq and TeleAtlas. They have both invested huge amounts of money in creating their maps, including driving around cities doing street-by-street mapping with vans, although most of their data came originally from official public street maps. Both companies have been the target of multi-billion dollar take over offers in the last year. In addition to capturing the map data, tagging (street names, one-way, turn restrictions, road type etc.) and validation (making sure streets link up correctly in the database) are also huge jobs. I wouldn't want to say that an open-source effort is not possible, but we shouldn't underestimate the magnitude of the job. It involves a lot more effort than just driving around a few streets in your neighborhood.
Every mapping system, from Google maps, to in-car GPS navigators, gets my apartment complex wrong. It shows up as being about a mile down the road from where it really is, and in a different city. So also, entering my zip code and/or address will list me as being within a different municipal boundary from where I really am.
What gives?
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
You think adding the Government would help improve mapping products? I'll keep my tax dollars, thanks.
The current solutions are slow to update as well. I the road I live on now has been here for 7 years, yet it's a field with no streets according to google, map quest, yahoo, etc. People can't search for my address on those sites as it doesn't exist on there.
I had an experience recently where I was driving through an unfamiliar town the next state over, following my Garmin. It took me on a route that, while leading eventually to the right place, did not seem to make much sense given the other roads available. I noticed a camper in the lane next to me that didn't seem to belong, and that driver also had a GPS navigator mounted on his windshield. So I found myself wondering: does he have the same unit (or data source) as me? If I did a study of all the non-local cars driving down this road, how many of them would have the same unit in their cars?
There are several interesting implications, the most obvious being "sponsored routing" down a particular street in a business dist.....gotta go, I'm on the phone with my patent attorney.
Evil is the money of root.
The government already creates these maps (TIGER), which are in the public domain. But I'll admit, it's a little fun to pretend that Google/MapQuest/Yahoo and whoever else are driving around all of the Western world with GPSs attached to their cars :)
~whm
You can help the open street maps project (http://www.openstreetmap.org/). They do everything that you were talking about. The only problem with it is that it is not big enough. However if you add your area it would really help the cause.
The Free Market crazies here in the States believe that nothing can possibly be produced that's better than what the free market can deliver. I'm not kidding; some people here are completely psychotic about it. I'm a big believer in free markets, but anybody with any sense understands the concepts of market failure and sets policy accordingly...
In Australia there is the Tracks4Australia project which uses user contributed GPS track logs to generate rural and remote area trail and road maps, mostly useful for 4WDers etc. They are working on a commercial product now but the basic mapset appears to be staying free.
If you use one of the Nokia internet tablets, try Maemo Mapper.
There are only 10 kinds of people in this world... those who understand binary and those who don't
(I see about 5-10 drivers a day drive up our street only to find it's a dead end even though this is clearly shown on the road signs; I guess they trust their SatNavs more than the road signs)
http://www.census.gov/geo/www/tiger/
Format is a bit obscure, but it works rather ok. We were able to use the data to draw road maps and then find paths on them. I'm sure it has it's own problems too but maybe you could contact them and point out the errors.
There exists some positive integer N that you are the Nth person to read this signature.
For the most part, you can't get free access to maps. Typically they are copyrighted and sold for profit. This is not to say that maps couldn't be made, and acquiring them similarly to the music databases should be possible. The problems are on the analysis side.
If the GPS receiver isn't moving, the solution it provides should be doing a random walk in the vicinity. If you are displaying a map based on some estimate of movement, the map should be undergoing random rotations and slight displacements as well. If we start moving slowly, the random jumps in apparent position are larger than our real change in position (most of the time), and so we have a random walk with drift. This is probably the case with walking, and possibly with bicycling. Travel by car inside city limits probably has the vehicle moving about as much, or a bit more, than the random jumps. Determining direction is a bit easier.
Out on the Great Plains, a plain GPS receiver can get fairly good positioning, but in trees, in the mountains, or in a city with tall buildings and poles, positioning can get bad.
What we would like as far as routing goes, is paths in memory, and logic/programming to decide on which path we are, which direction we are traveling the path, and our position on the path. This isn't straightforward to solve for.
You can submit map errors and recent road changes through Navteq's Map Reporter site (http://mapreporter.navteq.com/).
The funniest thing about the Garmin is that is will tell you to make illegal U-Turns.
The story goes like this: My girlfriend got one for Christmas and we where going to test it by going to get grandmothers house. Halfway there my girlfriend went on autopilot, so to speak, because she's done this trip so many times. All the sudden we hear "Make a U-Turn... Recalculating" What the hell? Then we hear it again... The Garmin was telling us to perform illegal U-turns to work on its gps calculations.
I wonder if that would hold up "But officer. The GPS told me to!"
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
The US government already has publicly available (for a fee) map data. This is the Census bureau's TIGER database. The problem is that it isn't entirely accurate or up to date. This is where the private map data companies come in. They all based their data sets off of TIGER but they send people around to correct errors, add new roads, and add metadata for better auto routing. This process isn't easy or cheap. The bureau is also working with the private companies to develop an enhanced TIGER database.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
My TomTom device has mapshare built in, I'd be astonished if Garmin did not. I've made dozens of map corrections (mostly silly stuff like incorrect street names) and they seem to update the maps often. My neighbourhood has been around for a while so no problems with the street layout here. I believe TomTom use Teradata maps whereas most other GPS systems use a different company.
I would love to see an open mapping project though.
Check out Roadster:
http://cairographics.org/roadster/
Here's a screenshot:
http://www.mp3car.com/vbulletin/attachments/linux/34562d1157775234-linux-gps-roadster-roadster-0.2.4-1.png
It has data available for the united states, download, compile, and give it a shot.
I've reported errors to several map makers, including Google maps and the makers of the maps in our phone directory. They all have ways to report errors. If each one of grabs a map right now and reports just one error, just think how much better the maps will be next year...
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
You can blame the government mainly your local streets dept for this. I've noticed state and federal highways being much more accurate than local or rural streets. May your deity help you if you live in a town that likes to rename side streets every few months.
Sure, it would be nice if there was some federal D.O.T. streets db for the entire country that your local streets department could upload all their changes into and all the GPS map folks would just that. I doubt it'll ever be that clean cut or that your local street department will want to even give any other city much less state or federal government department access to updated street info. This is just my personal experience working in a city police department and occasionally trying to get this information from the city entities that physically make and should be tracking these things.
The more that I see that its difficult or impossible for intercity departments to communicate I tend to think that the only real solution is for Pizza companies or UPS/FedEx to partner with Google streets to actually physically map out where their fleets move through.
If your city has a GIS department, then that should be keeping track of this information.... You could always do a FOIA request for any arcview street centerline data.
The problem is that most of us have problems getting that "updated" arcview street centerline data into our lowest price GPS device.
We have been collecting GPS positions at 10 second intervals since we began operations in London in 2004 (we're a courier company with a technology twist). We have collected 173 million positions on a 24/7 basis (growing by about 1 million per day) across our bicycle, motorbike, and van fleet. We have been donating to OpenStreetMap for years and have released our data for noncommercial use via a public API http://api.ecourier.co.uk/ under a CC license. Have fun!
The issue is Truckers buying GPS systems designed for Car users that do not include details about which road truck are banned on, and the truckers following the GPS directing as if they are the word of god and ignoring the clear road signs standing narrow road or low bridge......
GM Nav owners have tales to tell similar to the Garmin trapped truckers. GM's OEM (Denso?) has apparently declined suggestions to open an errata web site portal where users could report errors, new/upgraded roads and bridges, etc. A totally open sourced GPS database would be nice, but one that supported broader inputs from end users with vested interests in correct, up-to-date maps would be better.
Keeping the roads database up-to-date is a tremendously complicated task. First, you have to have timely updates from the people who make changes (governments, construction companies, etc.). Second, as with any database, the results are only as good as the data you enter. Do you really expect data input by millions of people (many who have no idea how important accurate data is) to be that good? The users of that data also have to agree on what should be stored, what it means, and how to use it (at least to some degree) to be consistent. How likely is it for various competing companies to agree to the same format and values? Not very.
So we need an international approach to map the world. But of course now we have governments involved, which in itself is a disaster waiting to happen. The US typically will then declare the data a National Security issue -- so much for that idea.
So we need an creative commons approach. Oh, wait, some cracker will want to corrupt the data just for grins so that all the big trucks are routed through Podunk, USA. Back to the same old problem.
The only viable solution would be to have real-time data collection on streets, construction, speeds, addresses, etc., etc., using the soon to be available vehicle-to-vehicle network. Come to think of it, what a surveillance system that would be...the US Government might be interested in this after all...
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
Please forgive the slightly off-topic post...
Two of the biggest map data providers are Navteq and TeleAtlas. Each company has a section on their website where you can report errors in their maps.
Since they will need to review your submission and mapping sites like Google Maps and Mapquest only update their map data a couple times a year, it will be a while before your correction goes public (if ever).
-- Halfabee
Somehow along the way I made a bad choice in life and now must live with 0 Karma.
There is an army of mappers available - namely the device users. Given that all the devices that are deployed can be synced to the internet for POI/map adjustment and generally have megs of flash storage available, it wouldnt be too hard to store notes on routes experienced and deviations from the known map if the user agrees to it. Suddenly you have hundreds of thousands of mappers. TomTom have already started to do something along these lines with their MapShare technology but IMHO it's a bit of a rubbish implementation and completely misses the point... Still, it's a start.
I am amongst the ones who believe we're only seeing the beginning of OSM everywhere. Contrary to your comment, I believe it is happening and will not take that long to reach some level of overall maturity. As to why is doesn't need an army of volunteers? Because, as done with the TIGER dataset, datasets are directly piped into OSM, as done in the Netherlands last year.
Animoog.org
... by avoiding the nice bridge and crossing the river 100 yards upstream where there is a dirt track, no bridge and about 8' of water ;)
I live in an isolated development between a river and a plateau.
--I thought I was wrong once, but I was mistaken.
Only turrurists would have a use for maps, to locate large masses of population to attack. Are you a turrurist? Are you planning to fly a plane into my home? I don't want you havin' no access to no accurate maps.
Sadly, that's precisely the motivation for such a project to NOT exist. We, as a country, have not lost, but the majority, afraid of terrorism to the point of giving up freedoms and rights that just make sense to hold on to, has lost. Sometimes it's hard to be on the winning side.
Swinging back on topic here, I would love to see such a project come into existence. It might just convince me to buy a GPS and contribute something more useful than the drivel I get modded up for on Slashdot.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
The free market mines whatever profit opportunities exist out of a system -- like it, hate it, doesn't matter. That's what it does.
When that system includes a feature for declaring "market failure" and acquiring access to a set of special rules, e.g. finance by involuntary tax dollars, the free market keeps right on rolling. Those who can see a way to profit from this feature promote its use. There _are_ no wise selfless and infallible Solons.
--
psychotic systems guy
As a kid, every map I saw showed this cross-street running between two streets. I never saw that street. Months and months of searching, never found it. Turned out that the mapmakers had all used a city powerlines map to reference where the streets were, and yes, there was a small run of powerlines through a wooded section between these two streets.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
doesn't send people to their death by unmarked railroad crossings. This is a really bad situation. They should just have a button on the GPS that says, "This route doesn't work" and sends the information back to the company.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Come and live in New Zealand, eh?
"It doesn't cost enough, and it makes too much sense."
I recently bought a TomTom GO 720, specifically because of this feature. While it is nice, it is a little less 'moderated' than the op's suggestion. There are options to decide which updates to accept, and that is good, but its hard to say how effective it is. Unfortunately, the only updates I feel safe with are the ones near my house, but coincidentally, they're also the ones I don't need :)
What would be nice would be a single 'map data' source so that changes could happen much more rapidly. I myself notice street names, etc that do not match my gps while flying down the highway / interstate, but as I am driving above 100 km / hr and trying to get to a destination, I don't stop to change them.
In my family we actually have 4 brands of GPS running, TomTom, Magellan, Mio / Pioneer, Garmin and all of them have different peculiarities to their mapping. The one thing that is consistent is the maps are definately improving. The Garmin is older, and one time it tried to have me 'take local roads' across the Mississippi! that ended up costing us approximately 3 hrs of travel time we weren't expecting..
To restate my previous point, aggregated map data would be great, then the GPS' would compete more on 'features / benefits / price' than they do currently on map quality / etc. For me, having more control of routing preferences would then be high priority on my list while currently it is map accuracy.
I personally would like to see an open source version of tomtom's mapshare. But for that it's first of all necessary to have open source software to make it easy to record such data.
It would be great to simply press 'record' and then drive along a new road and upload that road straight away. I'm quite sure it's not that complicated, with something like subversion at the backend.
I would wait a couple of days before taking a look!
I dunno if it's GPS who does that, but I live on a small, narrow, winding street right off a major street, right before a tunnel. About once a month, a big truck gets stuck on my street, obviously turning there after panicking before the tunnel (right above the tunnel is a minor industrial street on which it's not obvious how to get from the major street). They usually take 40-45 minutes to back-up all the way to the big street... Record was 2 hours for a 2-trailer rig, some years ago...
The GPS data is lousy to protect us from terrorism, of course. Some of us may even recall when the GPS data in the US was intentionally only accurate to about a block or so. The statement from the GPS providers was the same then - we didn't want terrorists to have good information on where anything in particular was in our country.
As long as the "global war on terror" is going on, we'll probably continue to see only semi-useful data from the GPS satellites.
In other words, forever.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Actually, from what I've learned, the reason alot of maps are incorrect is because they were drawn with bad data. I've noticed that my city has alot of streets on maps that don't exist or that are incomplete, and after asking around, I've found that this seems to happen for a couple reasons. In some cases the maps may have been drawn based on city plans. A right-of-way may exist where the road is shown on the map even though the road was never built or completed. In other cases roads have been changed or removed, and the maps have never been updated.
This is a great idea. We could have some federal government institution which deals with lots of maps anyway take the initiative and create digitized map data for the whole country, using information from USGS quads. For "fact checking", they could mail out the map data to every municipality in the country, who would make corrections which would be incorporated into the system. The data would be publicly available from the government for free, to be used by open-source or commercial makers of maps and map tools.
Congrats! You've just re-invented TIGER, run by the U.S. Census Bureau. If you use map software, it probably uses TIGER data. If the data in your town is inaccurate, it's because your local government sucks.
Folks, be aware that one way that a mapmaker "improves" on a copyright protection is to intentionally alter a small section of a map (and in a book, a few at random) that is hopefully not used. This helps them to prosecute somebody that steals the map information and resells it. Granted, this is known for hard-copy maps, but I believe it is also true for GPS maps as well (call them the "soft-copy" versions).
I can attest to this because near where my parents live on most maps there is a road that appears to go from their development right into the next one. Unfortunately, there is a gap of about 100 feet where there is no road but rather a swampy stream. And it gets better... When they were laying sewer lines, they put in in this swampy stream so that if somebody wants to extend the road they will have to build a bridge over the stream. So this would involve (and has involved) the state, county, and sewer authority determining how much each should pay.
You can guess how far this has gotten...I'm expecting it may happen when my (as yet unborn) great grandchildren reach 21 years of age...
Of course, this was the source of a lot of fun during the summer when growing up...my brother and I would sit out on the front lawn in the twilight/evening/night and watch the cars come zooming down to take the "short-cut" and then have to slam on their brakes and then back up and wander around aimlessly. Nobody ever crashed into the swamp, but one person almost hit the barrier at the end of the street.
Yes, I did call the map people (ADC) and report it several times over a decade. It's still that way in the latest edition, and I've seen the same mistake in an in-dash GPS display for the location in one car.
Guess it's now "Driver Beware"...
Supreme Granter of Doctor of Obviology Letters ("A FIRM Command of the Obvious")
I'm amused at the thought of trying to create an open-source version of a typical North American commercial GPS street/address database and navigation program. I've used a GPS system in my car for about 3 years now, and while I encounter the occasional error or omission, most of the time I marvel that it works at all, much less as well as it does. As someone who has worked on some very large scale software projects, I have to say that the software quality assurance (SQA) challenges and issues for both the database itself and generating navigation routes from Point A to Point B are enough to give me the heebie jeebies -- particularly given the IT industry's general track record on SQA practices.
..bruce..
Here's a reality check. Pick any one-square-mile area of your community and attempt to create (and keep up to date) a GPS navigation system that will legally, safely, and efficiently navigate you between any two addresses within that square mile, keeping in mind your civil liabilities should your system cause accidents, injuries, or illegal driving maneuvers. Oh, and your navigation system has to fit in a device that's about the same size as a Palm Pilot or an iPod touch and that runs on rechargeable batteries.
Now scale this up by about 3.5 million to cover the United States.
Bruce F. Webster (brucefwebster.com)
I worked as a surveyor for a private engineering firm a few years back and it isn't a simple task just to collect data and upload it. This applies for GPS data as well that you have to upload into GIS, or the like, software and manipulate it with any data-correction and overlays to aerial or satellite photography. Trust me, I spent hours cleaning up collection points and trying to get it to match up with the overlays with GPS data for invasive species management plans for a national park I worked at using ArcGIS (which is absolutely terrible to work with in comparison to ArcView). The surveying part usually requires some sort of CAD to properly map out what information you have collected during surveying and in-the-field math to figure out what goes where. It's not as simple as you think it might be.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
In France I was lead down a country lane that got narrower and narrower and eventually I came to the conclusion that I would not get my standard car through, so I turned round. Now My wife has a terrible sense of direction - or to be fair she is American and navigates by intersections, junctions and so on rather than by landmarks like you have to with the squiggly roads in Europe. (Actually I am as bad in the USA, all the roads and junctions look the same to me and by the time I read an exit sign's road number I have passed it) As I headed back the way I came my GPS was still locked on to the old route and said "make a U-turn when its safe to do so". It did this a couple of times at about 5 minute intervals when my wife said "you could have turned in the gateway there". I pointed out that it wanted to send us back the way we came, and that we had given up on that route. My wife said "I don't know why you brought that thing if you don't even listen to it". This got my teenage daughter and I laughing. Big mistake. Most women dislike being laughed at by husbands and by teenage daughters. Both laughing together is even less popular. My wife is a Texan, and Texan women don't usually keep it to themselves when they are unhappy.... End result, my GPS is at maximum throwing distance in some field in France.
Roadnav?
For context, click Parent.
Openstreetmap has come a LOOOONGGG way in the short time since its inception..
One of the best things about the project is the user control of the data. Upload a GPS tracklog of the area you deem deficient.
They recently gained access to a main source of GPS data (can't remember exactly who/where - maybe it's in the KDE4/Marble video? http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6642148224800885420&hl=en-GB @ 1:11:00)
This thing is poised to take off.
1. I use TigerData as a GIS professional and frankly its often crap. It was a good start for a rushed product in order to launch a project, but I would not now nor would I ever rely on its accuracy without checking it. The TigerData for my area regularly has roads going off the sides of mountains, roads where there have never been roads, etc. Also, the TigerData for my area has not been updated since it was released almost 8 years ago.
2. As for "driving around" it would depend upon how accurate the device is. The local utility company I work closely with spent 5,000$ just on the handheld to receive subcentimeter readings and about 20,000$ on the base station to accompany it. Your typical yellow DeLorme unit is great for driving around but it is not a data collection unit I would use when building maps. Depending upon satellite coverage for your area (weather, tree cover, geography, the placement of the 3 satellites needed to position accurately) your store bought unit could be as much as 100ft or more off your actual location and rarely closer than 5ft. Again depending upon coverage and the device. Then add the need for regular updates and mapping changes.
3. An open source mapping project would be great, but it is currently rather expensive to actually collect and process the data needed to build accurate maps. A terrific source of addressing and centerline information is your local E911 Board. At least in my part of the world they do much of the fire district, centerline, and, of course, addressing for mapping.
Mayor Dennis Elwell says residents on Fifth Street started complaining about trucks clogging their street about a year ago as GPS devices increased in popularity. Some drivers have to call police to open the gate because their trucks are too big to turn around. It looks like they made a gate to shield some gentrified neighborhood from the contact with lower classes, and ended up with a street full of trucks. Solution: open the fucking gate, you stupid yuppies!
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Try searching Google maps for "Dummy1456".
Good lord.
The NGS has been mapping the U.S. for 200 years. National Geodetic Surevy The U.S. Geological Durvey is an essential resource: Maps, Imagery and Publications
Tiger is put out by the USGS and it is the basis of many commercial mapping projects. They used to release DEM and other forms of data. It now seems to be publicly available as pdf files.
But, it is hit-or-miss. They try to incorporate planning and projection maps to keep ahead of the curve, but if someone changes a road after its originally projected survey, then Tiger will likely not receive that data. Also, there are a lot of roads that are roads only on paper. They have either fallen out of use, or were never actually built. Nor do they necessarily cover housing developments. Also, if you have a private driveway with about 6 or 8 houses sticking off it, the Tiger data will not show any of that.
I worked for the US Census in 1988 doing something they call a pre-census. They had crews in select counties taking the Tiger data and doing a canvas of an area. That was to give them an idea ahead of time of demographics for areas and to determine some baseline accuracy for their census maps. We had to X out roads that were not present, or draw in a lot. Was very ad hoc as some people were better at it than others.
The Tiger data has nothing in terms of traffic flow or patterns. You'd need to cross-index that with other external data, which is where commercial entities make their money. Someone has to verify the data and provide sanity checks. You can tell the USGS about errors in their base maps, but they do not care, nor are they tasked with tracking which of those lines are one-way streets.
Behold my horrible experience with Navteq when I tried to submit a map update.
:)
Long story short: I submitted the map update request 14 months ago, left comments every few months requesting action, or at least some feedback, and I have yet to get any kind of response, AT ALL. I even emailed their customer service division about the lack of response and (surprise!) I never got a response.
Navteq, your customer service sucks.
---------
Posting anon as this is where I really live.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that you're a proponent of Wikipedia... perhaps even someone who is deeply involved in that project?
OSM is going to have a lot of the same problems as the Wacky-pedia once (if) it becomes similarly popular. I can just picture the edit wars and the "Your GPS data is not NPOV!" fights now. I'll stick with something proprietary where there's some consequence for wrong data -- TomTom (et. al) know that if their data sucks, I'll pick up a different GPS next time around. Joe geek knows he can submit GPS data from the local bike path as "Mulberry Street" and the consequences are... nothing.
All the wrong-headed folks out there who don't think the screwing things up just because you can (or want to, or see some benefit in it for yourself) isn't part of human nature are ignoring the last 10,000 years of human history.
Map data will make or break a GPS product. To me, you are committing monetary suicide if you buy a GPS where you cannot regularly update the maps, and/or the manufacturer does not provide such updates.
Most consumer-level GPSes do not have updateable maps, and those that do just update you with a year-old map they got for cheap.
I have a Garmin GPSMAP-496 and I *love* it.
If you want a good GPS with an accurate map, you have to pay for it. The $100 Mio piece-o-shit GPS is going to have, at best, a 3-5 year old map on it that they picked up a license for on the cheap. I tried a Mio, and it didn't even have a new map for the intersection of North Wales and Morris roads in 19446, which had been redesigned a decade or more ago. The result: "Turn right down this road that doesn't exist anymore."
There were also many cases where it would tell me to drive a mile or more out of my way, only to turn around and go back. It also sent me down dead-end streets SEVERAL times because it thought they still went through. Again, these changes around town were made a decade or more ago, but the Mio had no idea because the manufacturer used really old map data.
Of course your map is wrong; you don't live on an Interstate. A few points to make on the digital mapping companies responsible for all the maps, update cycles and TIGER. And some bias, I was a former employee of one of the digital mapping companies. In the US (And globally) There are two companies that are responsible for all the digital maps Tele Atlas (Owned by TomTom) and Navteq (Owned by Nokia). If you look at any GPS device or online map site you will see a copyright from one or both companies. Their business is driven by getting people from point A to Point B the fastest i.e. by routing you to nearest highway and having you drive on it for the longest amount of time possible. The main focus is the US highway system: Interstates, US Highways, State Highways, Regional, County and Municipal Routes and the major metropolitan areas. If you don't live in the metro areas there is very little business need for correcting the errors in your locality. Why fix the streets in Stowe, VT (pop 6,000) when many more people will be served if the streets and addresses were updated in Cary, NC (pop 130,000 metro area of Raleigh, NC)? Each company works on a quarterly update cycle where a new version of their mapping database is available for purchase every 90 days or so. Some customers get the quarterly updates some get annual updates. The GPS units and online mapping sites are only as good as the currency of their maps. Make sure you update you maps every time an update comes out. There is always construction and changes in the road system and old maps will not reflect the newer changes. Just because Google Maps says the copyright is 2008 doesn't mean the map has been updated recently. I know when I was working for the mapping company we were working on a huge project for a car company that would be taking the mapping database produced in Fall 06 and using it for the navigation systems in their 2008 cars. If you do have a specific problem go right to the source to get it fixed Navteq map reporter or Tele Atlas Map Insight. The US Gov't does have a free nationwide map you can use TIGER (Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing) Produced by the Census Bureau. When was the last Census done? 8 years ago? Yea that gives you an idea of how accurate the TIGER map is. TIGER was made for government applications showing very accurate municipal boundaries and topology of streets. To get an open source Map project going you will need a good sized server, Volunteers in just about every municipality, good database software that can hold every thing you ever wanted to know about streets (name, address, one way, truck and vehicle restrictions, routing info, Points of Interest, zip code, real time traffic data, gated communities, municipal boundaries, state locality, ect...) a great set of possionally accurate aerially imagery (preferable 10m acct or less) for alignment of streets, and did I mention a large army of helpers in every municipality. Just make sure you get the newest maps updates for your navigation device and go directly to the source for map fixes: Navteq map reporter or Tele Atlas Map Insight.
There is project TrackSource http://www.tracksource.org.br/ in Brazil (beware, page is in Portuguese), born out of frustration with limited coverage on Garmin's official maps.
While being volunteer-built and free as in beer, it is not open as in there's no source-code being re-distributed - by source-code I mean the actual data that is used to build the maps you upload to the devices. This limits the usability of the project for other applications.
Cool, nonetheless.
Regards,
K.
All the maps in the world won't do a darn bit of good if your GPSr won't read them or route on them. Proprietary maps are how Garmin and other GPSr vendors make money.
However, the site GeoNames has a *huge* world database of features with coordinates. I've used it for a few weird searches for a personal project. It's released under the creative commons attributions license. It's a bit raw for what you need, but I'm sure a dedicated group of folks could groom it to the purpose you require.
Method of processing duck feet
OSM already has those features - they're called tags (not layers)
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Map_Features
At some point, somewhere, the entire internet will be found to be illegal.
It would be great if someone working with the new Open Moko phone could add a Open GPS mapping project. I understand the new phone will have GPS and have an open stack. Just need someone to sponsor the project.
http://www.openmoko.com/
maps.google.com lets you correct any address you look up
I made GIS maps for years, always using public data. And there is a lot out there, and it is government subsidized, and it can be of marginal quality. The only nationwide project I am aware of is the TIGER project, which is supposed to release a new, provisional data set every year. When you can get it to work, its pretty good. Federal agencies also often release their own datasets, and we would often have forest service, national park service, and blm data on the same maps, sometimes in overlapping areas. Then there are the county datasets. And the city where I live put out their own dataset a few years back. So there's plenty of data, and it is almost all free. Companies that charge for it often have done post-processing or packaging which I believe they have government contracts to do and are allowed to recoup their investment.
Where trouble often comes in is in projections, spheroids, datums and the like. GIS data on different scale will use a different model of the globe to pinpoint places, will use different coordinate conventions, often related to the agency that produced the set (eg the city always used something called state plane, the fs always uses the nad27 datum, well, mostly). Two datasets that have location information for the same road can be meters off simple because they are not represented in the same projection correctly either by the software or the person doing the projection. And these are just location issues. Tabular data is a whole other thing.
The poster sounds a little uninformed about GIS in general.
As an example that it can be done, I'd like to mention the Mapear project http://www.proyectomapear.com.ar/, which is a community-driven open-source mapping project which has already covered most of the Argentina territory (2,766,890 km^2).
Currently, the Mapear community has over 48500 members who collaborate by sending tracks, drawing maps, submitting bugs, etc. AFAIK, this is one of the largest (by coverage and member count) community-driven mapping projects in active development.
As a result, the current map surpasses on many aspects its commercial counterparts.
The area around my house was extremely wrong on all the mapping sites. There were many roads that never actually came to exist due to changes in construction plans. Many roads that showed they met, but did not in reality.
I contacted Google to get their fixed & they provided me with contact information for their source data. I contacted them. Explained that the Google Hybrid view showed aerial pictures and those were accurate. Now the mapping is perfect on most mapping software packages.
The Openstreetmap site has it better than Google previously had it, but it's still way off from reality.
Increasingly, there is good data from local government. Both TeleAtlas and Navteq try to get this data. Not all governments make it available on reasonable terms. In some states, there is an organized effort to create good maps of the entire state. There is also some effort to coalesce mapping collection within government. Often there are four or five independently developed maps. A county may have a GIS department, your local town or city may have one, your local 9-1-1 PSAP has one, and often there is a state map. While today, they all are independent, with different "base maps", we do see some changes where there is sharing of map data among the government entities. The ideal is that local government has a single, accurate, up to date map, which feeds both state-wide maps, and is made available to the commercial companyies who depend on good map data. I work on the 9-1-1 system, and I can tell you that, for example, if the local utilities used the same base map as the PSAP, things would be A LOT better, and the utility crews could probably provide another great source of error checking, updates and additional information that would benefit other map users. It could be win-win: local government provides the base map and a set of public layers, which is given at low cost to commercial enterprises so long as they contribute errors, updates and layers appropriate for the government to have.
I think navigation systems shouldn't be GPS and definitely shouldn't be open. If you ask me, and no one does, GPS is like a compass -- it's great when you're lost in the wilderness. But in cities, it's totally useless.
I'd like to see an LPS system -- a local positioning system at the municipal level. A few of my friends have a saying -- MapQuest doesn't live in Toronto. All of the driving directions and such just plain stink in a city that you know well.
But aside from the technical issues, I'd like to see my local government handling the local navigation systems. It costs a few thousand dollars to put up a road sign, and a few pennies to add it to the LPS. I'd like to see my government involved in making certain that the mapping data for its city roads are perfect. I'd like to see my car tell me that it's a one-way street, or that there's a construction detour, and have it be not only correct, but legally liable and "officially correct".
Let the car switch over to GPS when I leave city limits -- I'm in a city of at least 250 square kilometres, I don't leave too often.
Of course, I'd like to see my current GPS car open the damn garage door for me too. How difficult is that? I voice-commanded "destination home" it said "you have arrived at your destination" and the damn rear view mirror has a button to open the garage. Of course, a whole fancy FOB keyless entry system still has me pulling out my keys to open the garage when going to my car -- the car remote hasn't got a garage door button on it either.
Maybe I'm just being silly.
We have Garmin GPS device. The first day we got it, I discovered a bug in the map. It had our house located approximately a block away from where it is and on the opposite side of the street.
:-)
:-)
The same bug shows up on Yahoo, MapQuest, and Google. Not surprising, since they all use they same source from maps.
With this - and my experience trying to address it - in mind, it was interesting to read the following in the original article:
"Garmin International spokesman Jake Jacobson says the GPS maker has to receive a request or complaint and go through a thorough process before maps can be changed."
I have searched the Garmin site - though not recently - to find a place to report a map error to no avail. I guess it is easy to never get a request or complaint if there is no way to report it
Turns out that the father of one of families at our children's schools was involved in early map generation efforts. Turns out that by and large - at least in the point in time - they weren't going out and getting a GPS fix on each map point.
Rather, they were getting fixes on key points and then using a algorithim to determine the GPS fix for the other map points. When a street follows the expected algorithim, then they are golden. When like our street, it does not, then things break down.
The issue on our street is highly variable lot frontage on the street and the layout of the street from low to high being reversed. The two factors end up with the Garmin determined points being completely scrambled.
This is a big pain when I ask a driver to take me to the airport. Even though I tell them that their GPS device is completely wrong, they always end up going to the wrong house
Yours,
Jordan
Not exactly what was asked, but http://www.wikimapia.com/ seems like a place to start.
I once went to a presentation by one of the two main navigation map suppliers. The presenter made a big deal about their data being "fully qualified" by which he meant that it took into account things like one-way streets, overpasses (so that the nav software didn't think you could make a left turn from a bridge onto the street below), etc. I'm not sure what it takes to create such a database, but I came away with the impression that it's a lot more than just driving around the streets; it needs the active involvement of the driver. It would probably make a public-domain effort much more complex and error-prone.
I have to agree that even the US Census folks are well into this move something copyright scheme. Furinstance:
Here at the house, my Garmin 12 consistently places me several hundred feet from where its laying in the windowsill according to roadnav, and roadnav, running on TIGER line maps, has always placed the street in front of my house only a few feet from the alley going behind the houses across the street from me while leaving a quite nice wide back yard between me and the neighbors across the fence. Similarly, at the end of a trip to go say goodbye to a daughter dying of cancer recently I punched in her address in Iowa into roadnav, and again the TIGER maps were off, by nearly half a mile. I don't think my old Garmin 12 is off that much.
Cheers, Gene
My Navigon 2100 has a "Block" feature that let's you calculate a detour when part of the road in front of you is blocked. You can also tell it to avoid the given road in the future.
What the hell are truckers doing using consumer GPSes anyway? Can't their headquarters map out their routes for them? In any case, a GPS can't do any worse than a human with a map who doesn't know that a particular road is closed off a few hours each day...
This is my favorite Google Maps screwup. In map mode it looks fine. Then switch to satelite and you will see it is a parking lot, a gated loading dock and truck storage, then a private driveway to a family farm. If you can make it through all that without being shot - you can hook back up with a real road.
http://tinyurl.com/2n6bm7
Snowmobilers have started uploading data.
A similar site could be started for "roadies".
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
Why New Zealand and not the US? Mostly because the US is QUITE a bit larger, with many more roads, as has been already stated. Same ting with cell-phone coverage - coverage in the UK is really good...in the US, well, it takes a bit more work than meets the eye. We have a New Zealand. We call it Hawaii.
Quiz: True or False -- On a scale of 1 to 10, what is your middle name?
It doesn't take a year for the company to say "Thanks for the information. Unfortunately it may take us over a year to map that area. Thank you for your patience."
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Not to mention zip codes.
Government funding means (hopefully) public-domain licensing. Sounds good to me.
Found link to http://www.openstreetmap.org/ on the openmoko developers wiki.
I was constantly fighting for new editions, renewing subscriptions, more information.
Maps were a constant headache, especially in urban/suburban areas.
The only thing new in this world is the history that you don't know.[Harry Truman]
Well, maybe its trying to hint at something.
cheers, http://88.80.13.160/wiki/Wikileaks
I seem to recall that each company puts some purposeful errors (such as non existant streets) into thier maps so that they can claim a copyright on it.
Could be urban legend, but thats what I heard a while back.
The problem has nothing to do with "so-so" devices or other bull. The problem is clearly with the town.
1. They added the gate
2. Their maps do not list the road as dead end
3. Trucks go there - dead end
4. WTF??!?
So what should have been done to avoid the trucks? They should have made the road as a "no truck" route. Problem solved. They want a gated community? Make the road a dead-end on maps so there is no car traffic except for cases when people know what is going on.
It is sad that people make devices responsible for a fsck-up by the local town. The town is responsible for making sure that roads are clearly depicted on their maps, including any blockades. Yes, including electronic maps (these are the vector maps for roads)
Why do we need yet another government service? Is there something wrong with just creating an alliance of interested parties to get the work done? USGS does some great work, although not ideally suited for electronic navigation their efforts can certainly be incorporated in a free mapping project. Many states already carry fairly detailed county maps already. The government projects already exist and are already funded, it's just a matter of gathering together all the data and compiling it. And you don't need the government to be able to do that when all these government produced maps are readily available to the public.
A coalition of GPS vendors, mapping software vendors, open source advocates and various state and county governments would be able to easily get the job done without some sort of mandate from the top.
If you don't like that idea, I'm sure you can just ask Obama to create a government entity to oversee this.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
As soon as I can get access to the OpenSatelite project I'll help out.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
They buy them.
You can buy them too. Very expensive, and most of the US maps are completely shite anyway. If you were to create a good database of routes, streets etc, the PND and phone manufacturers would love you.
The only really updatable maps I've come across are Google maps, and of course Nokia have Ovi on the way, where the whole point is to be able to sync routes/locations with your friends.
Deleted
Should that comment really be marked "troll" just because it referenced Mr. 9/11 in the subject line? Wasn't the semi-useless consumer GPS of the 90's supposed to have been an anti-terrorism move at the time?
Perhaps the author could have used a kinder subject, but does the message body really meet the criteria for the dreaded "troll" tag?
I, uh, didn't get the karma I have by, uh, trolling. Please, uh, read the, uh, whole post before you, uh, moderate. Thanks.
It's a sad truth that, in the United States of America, there are people out there who truly fear the availability of highly accurate GPS navigation data to the general public because that data may fall into the hands of terrorists who, in some people's minds, would otherwise be unable to find their targets.
Past that, if such a GPS project became known to me, I may well feel the urge to pick up a GPS and start helping out with said project.
A valid observation about the state of a nation, a valid point about the existence of a project and a valid stance on cooperation with a similar future project. Someone's gonna get their ass handed to them in meta-moderation.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
As a mapping professional I can insert some truth to this Slashdot orgy of mis-information. There is publicly available data for road centerlines in nearly every state, this data tends to be rather accurate, and thus large. For the use of GPS, you need to use generalized and often closed formats, and thus this accurate data won't work. Most GPS companies buy their data from data wholesalers Navtec, Teleatlas...etc. I have an assoc who works for one of these companies, they collect the publicly available data and reform it to their formats, they also dither(generalize) the data down so it'll be smaller in filesize. Often times the data warehouses will take the accurate vector data and convert it to low res raster data. If TomTom or Garmin wanted accurate data they could get it, but they are willing to do the work or take the time. Tiger data is very generalized, but will be revised very soon to increase the accuracy. Again this was a matter of data size, the accurate data was dithered again. Also bear in mind these GPS devices still aren't overly accurate. but there is freely available road centerline data in every state I can think of, in my state it is nearly survey accurate. As for street names, that is a whole additional ballgame, that is very intensive data collection.
While this might be a "nice" thing for the government to do, it certainly isn't the best way the government can spend "our money". People who suggest that the government should pay for a scheme like this should be made to pay 20% more income tax than the rest of us.
Freemap.co.il already collects free data for Israel roads and the SW is GPLed. Site is in Hebrew but I checked out my neighborhood and it is accurate! PocketPC with WM2003 and up. Windows XP / Linux J2ME enabled cellulars...
Here's the thing from someone that actually works with enterprise geospatial software. It's a LOT harder than it sounds to do something like this. Even in a controlled environment with good templates, qualified drafters and multi-layer QC, creating a VERY large vector dataset is a very difficult task. The geometry is difficult and time consuming, but that's NOTHING compared to the attributes that go into it. When you're routing people with directions, you need all kinds of attributes like geocoded addresses, road name, numeric designation, road type, road restrictions (bridge weight limits, one-way,etc) road width, proper exit recording, and many more that I'm forgetting. QC is the killer here.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
If you want the data fixed in the map that feeds google and garmin, then you can request the fix in
http://www.mapreporter.com/
Regards
As with some of the other posters that have dealt with GIS in one form or another, so do I. I am a GIS analyst for a county government, and I can tell you that when any new roads are cut, we are the ones that start the ball rolling. So, you can see that over time, lots of governmental organizations are the ones that initally put these roads out there (aka make available for distribution). If you take my particular organization, multiply that by every county and local government in the country, you can see the conflation that occurs when your major road navigation companies try to stitch these together. I dont know the exact number, but some states have different projections for their data, and there's at least one for every state. States that have some kind of non-equal extents (california and north carolina come to mind)usually have multiple ones. Assembling this data takes time and effort, even if it's just updating what they already have.
Another problem is that you dont want every tom, dick, and harry editing GIS data for the masses. Control is key, and there is an implication that the data has been quality checked and will lead you to wherever you go. If you have grandpa out there, logging some points and uploading them to the public, how do you know that he put the data through differential correction and the lines are topologically correct?
One final thing...my county doesn't try to profit off of it, but there's many, many governments that charge some pretty high fees for somebody to go in and buy their data. You think that they would give that up easily, when they're basically making total profit off of the data and we have to maintain it as part of our job? No way.
So my advice is this: there are ways to convert and upload basic GIS shapefiles into your GPS units if you so wish. Check with the local authority to get your best data. Our E-911 system uses it, shouldn't you?
The fact that 4% of the roads carry 90% of tourist traffic may very well be due to weak maps. As a tourist I have the time and desire to ramble scenic backroads but I often have no better map than a Rand McNally atlas. So no wonder the small roads don't carry tourist traffic. If I could load up a flash memory chip or two (or ten) with good accurate high-detail map data, I'd be confident enough to see what I really want to, on my holidays.
Having mapped a couple of square miles for OpenStreetMap, I can attest to the fact that these alterations are incredibly common on Google Maps. There are half a dozen within half a mile of my house, most being added curves or extensions to dead-end roads and added or removed traffic islands. Google also cunningly add fake roads to the map data which correlate with features which look like roads on the satellite imagery but actually aren't - they're private drives, streams, paths rather than roads through woodland etc. The ones near me wouldn't seriously affect navigation, but some I've seen in the past would. Oh yes, Google Maps is also shifted by about 5m from WGS84 (GPS coordinates) round here, I presume this is intentional too.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
This example doubtlessly has nothing to do with copyright protection. It's simply a "paper road". Nothing sinister in that, there are probably millions of paper roads in the world which either were once in the past, will be in the future, or may never even become, proper formed roads.
NZ Electronics Enthusiasts: Check out my Trade Me Listings
That's pretty bad.Folks, be aware that one way that a mapmaker "improves" on a copyright protection is to intentionally alter a small section of a map (and in a book, a few at random) that is hopefully not used. This helps them to prosecute somebody that steals the map information and resells it. Granted, this is known for hard-copy maps, but I believe it is also true for GPS maps as well (call them the "soft-copy" versions).
I think it should be illegal to intentionally mess up a Map
Pass a law that requires the map maker to pay someone $10,000 each time they find a flaw and I guarantee the problem will be solved very fast.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
...and I happen to use the open source mapping software mentioned. It has decent details down to street level all over the country, which is nice, because the default map of NZ is jagged and boxy even at 100km resolution. With the new map, we get fluid coastlines, street names, and all sorts. Quite the useful tool!
OK, I feel stupid for asking this, but are you serious about those being intentional alterations? They sound more like screwups of some kind.
Go to www.navteq.com . Hit the "map reporter" button. Report the inaccuracy.
...), in certain situations, the data includes information about times when restrictions are conditionally applied. I wouldn't be terribly surprised to learn that neither, Google, Garmin, nor others pay attention to the time-specific conditional restrictions on that particular connection. Very few routing solutions do generally (ours does partially, but that is another discussion), as the syntax in the spec sucks (it's bloated and ugly to parse).
Being that I work for a company that uses Navteq data for routing (as do Google, Garmin,
Considering that Navteq purposefully breaks their data to prevent wholesale copying, breaking their data in a way that improves their customers' products probably wouldn't be a bad idea.
So, who has a GPS coordinate of the particular location so that we can all submit a ticket to Navteq to have them update their data (and I can test our product for similar silliness).
If you see a popup that says "Sponsored by BigBadWolfCo", you probably should be concerned.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Probably surpising to most US users that there are open source projects of this nature in other parts of the world. Mainly because the GPS maps available there are so poor. These guys run a very good cooperative project http://www.tracks4africa.com/ If you contribute good data, you are entitled to an edited product. They spend a lot of time and effort making sure that the routes they supply are as accurate as possible. In general only routes submitted more than once will make it into the final version.
You might want to check this out:
http://ump.waw.pl/en/index.html
More is in Polish. Generally almost the entire country is mapped now. And maps are really usable, I have tested them on my Garmin Nuvi.
Regards
Isn't there a time factor missing? If a dedicated mapper can exhaustively map a city of 40k inhabitants in however much time, can't that same mapper map two cities (or one pop-80k city) in twice as long? Or is mapping somehow an ongoing activity? (I can imagine things needing changes, but I can't imaging that being as huge a project as mapping the city the first time around)
If each contributor to OpenStreetMap only works on a single street, then it will only need an average of one contributor from each street in the world.
However, most contributors work on many, many streets. I've only been involved for a very short time and I've already added/fixed a few streets, added parking areas, post offices, banks, ATMs, police stations, and public toilets. When I started contributing to OpenStreetMap, I was a bit disappointed because most of my area had already been mapped. The CBD in every major city has also been mapped. It currently has information (eg. public toilets, fast food places other than just McDonald's, pharmacies, banks, and ATMs) that is not on any other map that I am aware of.
My contributions would continue, but almost everything I know about my local area was already on there before I started contributing. You're probably one of those people who still thinks that "Wikipedia isn't viable because it would take an army of volunteers to make an entire free online encyclopedia!"
Well, I don't work for Google or whoever they get their data from so I can't be absolutely sure, but they resemble known "easter eggs" I've seen examples of. I guess misplaced data points could be responsible for some of the errors. I suspect it's pretty hard to accidentally invent a road name for a nameless footpath though.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
If Google Maps are getting maps that have lat/long following a local transform, 5m is about as close as you're going to get to WGS84 outside of the US.
I'd love to see an open source project that uses TIGER data to create maps.
I don't know how accurate the height is, I'm just going by the 2D overlay of my GPS position on Google Maps satellite imagery. Only a few miles to the East is an OS passive GPS station (precisely surveyed concrete block) and that's spot on, as is my dad's house a few miles to the South. I wouldn't expect it to vary so much over such short distances, but I'm not a cartographer. I do recall reading that Google did shift things deliberately, but I can't find a reference. I'm in the UK too.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News